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• • January 19, 2014 at 5:09 am #66725
    Bambang Damayanto

    Participant

    Hi My Name is Bambang Damayanto. I would like to ask something about the way to make character style automation for foreign words. Sometimes when we write the book, we want to put the italic style for foreign words. So…, here I’m ask how to make or the way to create some automation italic or bold style for every foreign words, so I don’t have to change every word one by one. Thanks

  • January 19, 2014 at 12:19 pm #66726
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    Hi, Bambang

    How is the file being set? Are you importing a word file or a tagged text file? If so, is the italic already in place for those words. If so, the italic should come through when importing.

    If they are not tagged for italic or bold or a character style sheet, then I hate to say that InDesign won’t know what constitutes a foreign word.

    Are you asking if InDesign will automatically know what is a foreign word and what isn’t? And then be able to automatically apply a character style?

    If so, then InDesign can’t do that, so far as I know.

    It will either have to be tagged in the word file or the tagged text file that you import.

    Dwayne

  • January 19, 2014 at 8:19 pm #66727
    Bambang Damayanto

    Participant

    Thanks Dwayne for your response. In my case, they are not tagged for italic, then I think that InDesign will detect foreign words when we turn on the check spelling. So perhaps by using greps or scripts, we can automatically change the words in italic style.

  • January 20, 2014 at 12:20 pm #66741
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    I’m not sure even the spellcheck would reliably detect foreign words.
    Take English as the “non-foreign” language for these examples of a false positive and false negative:
    1. English names of people/places won’t necessarily be in the spellcheck dictionary, but are not “foreign” words.
    2. Some words were originally foreign, were used in English, but are now rare in English, and still common in the original language: these would not be picked up by the spellchecker but are probably “foreign” in this context. For example, the word “bruit” is the common French word for “noise”, but is also a rarely-used English word for “spreading a rumour”.
    3. Some words are spelled the same in two languages with completely different meanings. How does the spellchecker know if it’s the “foreign” language or not?

    Of course GREP would work if the two languages were using different scripts (English/Russian/Arabic/Hindi/Chinese etc etc.)
    ??????, Chris.

    Edit: the ????? was namaste in Hindi, which the forum rejects!

  • January 21, 2014 at 8:31 am #66746
    Bambang Damayanto

    Participant

    Hi Thompson, thanks for your great advice. Well, I’m still trying to get the solution. I try to combine with some GREP expression and scripts.

  • January 21, 2014 at 5:05 pm #66749
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    How large in your file, Bambang?

    I’m thinking that by the time you write scripts and do GREPs, it would take less time to do the foreign words.

    How many foreign words do you think are in your file?

    @ThompsonText: Great info on the spellcheck. I was going to mention that.

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