CreativePro Forum

Return to Member Forum

• Author
  Posts
• • January 23, 2019 at 9:39 am #113830
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Hi,
    I’ve been asked to lay out a short interlinear book. For those unfamiliar with the genre, that means Hebrew text, running right to left, with a line of English translation below, with the LTR English translation below the corresponding Hebrew word.
    Is there a good workflow for accomplishing this in Indesign? Or if not, what software would I want?
    I first thought to have two textboxes, one for the Hebrew and another for the English, but there are two issues:
    1) The translation is sometimes longer than the Hebrew, possibly even two lines for a single word, so some translations need to be multiple lines, not merely text running in the reverse direction
    2) I can’t just flip the order of the English text and have it run right to left, because I need to make sure each phrase reads correctly LTR.
    I will try to attach an image of what I mean so the Indesign experts can advise me
    Thanks!

  • January 23, 2019 at 12:30 pm #113834
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I realized I can’t attach images, so here’s a link to an example of what I mean: https://photos.app.goo.gl/7j7rpHfnBiUBL2Ho9

  • January 24, 2019 at 2:42 am #113837
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    Has the translation already been done? Is the translation already lined up with the corresponding Hebrew in Word or some other program?
    It seems to me to be a problem of structure. If you’ve got the “alignment” of the two languages, there should be some way of doing this, but it escapes me at the moment.
    You could see the layout as a series of 2-row tables but each with variable numbers of columns. And tables might overcome the problem of the English running longer than the Hebrew, as the cell contents would wrap?
    Mmm, rather you than me.

    Chris, thinking out loud but not getting very far.

  • January 24, 2019 at 6:01 am #113839
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Thanks for helping me think this through. The translation has been done, but supplied to me in the regular English way, so however I do it–as per your table suggestion, or some other way–I would need to copy and paste each individual English phrase into the appropriate cell/column/corresponding spot

  • January 24, 2019 at 6:15 am #113840
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    Hmm, the prospect of copy+paste is not very attractive, is it.

    It seems you’re right, however you do it, at some point in the process, someone has to structure the two languages into sections (of 1 Hebrew word + 1 or more English words) that match.

    Good luck!

  • January 24, 2019 at 10:27 am #113845
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    The Hebrew version of InDesign can control paragraph and text direction. You can do that in older versions, too, with WorldTools from in-tools.com

  • January 24, 2019 at 11:12 am #113846
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I use WorldTools, but it doesn’t help to just reverse the paragraph direction, since phrases need to stay together going left to right

  • January 24, 2019 at 11:21 am #113847
    David Goodrich

    Participant

    Many versions ago InDesign added the ability to annotate one or a few characters. You might or might not get this to work for your situation.

    So-called ‘furigana’ are essential in CJK typesetting, but before CC versions the details were not available in the English-language interface. Adobe’s help file explains them here<https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/formatting-cjk-characters.html#add_ruby_to_text, using the alternate name, Ruby Text. You may still need to jump through some hoops to see the relevant menus in English, so you might want to experiment with MS Word’s “Phonetic Guide” feature for a general idea of how this works. Adobe’s Help says the offset of the ruby text can accept a negative value, which may or may not allow you to move the annotation below the parent text (MS Word apparently allows only positive vallues). Switching direction between RTL and LTR is crucial for you but I don’t know where you can find out about this — ruby are seldom discussed on Adobe’s forums. MS Word limits the annotations to about 20 chars., another detail that could be important.

    If you have some HTML experience you may already know that HTML5 can also handle ruby text. This is one of the more complex features added in HTML5 (and therefore ePub3), so you cannot assume it will work everywhere. Still, it might be worth checking out <https://www.w3.org/International/articles/ruby/markup.en.

    I might experiment with single-line paragraphs, with alternating languages and directions, perhaps with tabs between words/phrases to tweak alignment. But that seems like a lot of hand-work.

    Good Luck,
    David

  • January 24, 2019 at 12:12 pm #113849
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Yes–that seems to be the consensus–a lot of tedious hand work, no shortcuts!

  • January 30, 2019 at 5:46 am #114025
    Masood Ahmad

    Participant

    Nehama, If you remember Adobe has a separate version for these Right to Left languages, called Adobe InDesign ME (Middle East). But I think that ME version has been dropped by Adobe and you can switch to Arabic mode by selecting the Arabic language while installing the application. Though on my personal PC, I prefer to work on Adobe InDesign ME CS6 :)

    Once you switch to the Arabic language, you’ll find options for Arabic support eg. Right-to-Left paragraph direction etc. With Arabic support enabled, you can work on Hebrew easily.

    In case you do not want to do that, try the r2l scripts. Don’t worry with their filename i.e. cs4, they still work in CC versions. I have been using these from a very long time. All you need is to keep these scripts in the Scripts Panel and run the desired script on the selected text. The script names are self explanatory.

    r2l_characterdirection_flip.jsx
    r2l_characterdirection_r2l.jsx
    r2l_paragraphdirection_flip.jsx
    r2l-assign_WR_composer_to_ps.jsx
    r2l-assign_WR_para_composer.jsx
    r2l-assign_WR_single_composer.jsx
    r2l-paragraph_style_Arabic.jsx
    r2l-paragraph_style_Hebrew.jsx

    https://desktoppublishingforum.com/bb/archive/index.php/t-8713.html

    https://auto-download.com/download/get/hdXVD5bn/r2l_scripts_for_id_cs4_zip.html

    Hope that works for you.

  • March 11, 2020 at 5:45 am #11384443
    David Goodrich

    Participant

    InDesign added the ability to annotate one or a few characters many versions ago. You might or might not get this to work for your situation.

    So-called <i>furigana</i> are essential in CJK typesetting, but before CC versions the details were not available in the English-language interface. Adobe’s help file explains them here, using the alternate name, Ruby Text. You may still need to jump through some hoops to see the relevant menus in English, so you might want to experiment first with MS Word’s corresponding “Phonetic Guide” feature to get a general idea of how this works. Adobe’s Help says the offset of the ruby text can accept a negative value, which may or may not allow you to move the annotation below the parent text; MS Word apparently allows only positive values. Switching direction between RTL and LTR is obviously crucial for you but I don’t know where you can find out about this — ruby are seldom discussed on Adobe’s forums. MS Word limits the annotations to about 20 chars., another detail that could be important.

    If you have some HTML experience you may already know that HTML5 can also handle ruby text. This is one of the more complex features added in HTML5 (and therefore ePub3), so you cannot assume it will work everywhere. Still, it might be worth checking out <i>Ruby Markup</i>.

    I might experiment with single-line paragraphs, with alternating languages and directions, perhaps with tabs between words/phrases to tweak alignment. But that seems like a lot of hand-work.

    Good Luck,
    David

• Author
  Posts