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Chris ThompsonMember
Education, education… if you can, educate the writers.
I’m often in a similar situation producing the translated versions of ID documents, where most languages naturally run longer than English anyway. If only I could get the original designers to leave a bit of room for expansion, I’d be in a better position to avoid ruining their carefully-crafted layouts! Often though, translation (effectively = future-proofing for content changes) is the last thing considered at the initial design stage.Chris ThompsonMemberThanks Steve. I’ve still got a copy of CS6 for opening PageMaker! And weren’t certain old versions of ID able to open old-ish Quark files?
And thanks Mike (typing simultaneously). Useful to know.- This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by Chris Thompson. Reason: Quark
- This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by Chris Thompson.
Chris ThompsonMemberCheck what language the text is set to?
If it’s French or something else that uses chevron quotes, InDesign replaces ‘ and ” with the chevron style. Ditto for German with low opening and high closing quotes.Chris ThompsonMemberDoes setting Optical Margin Alignment (in the Story panel) make a difference?
Chris ThompsonMemberWhat happens if you go to the Character panel, drop-down menu, and uncheck “Ligatures”?
Or a clunky workaround – insert a zero-width space between the offending letters?Personally, I’d leave the ligature there, as some typeface designer has gone to the trouble of trying to make it look nice!
Good luck,
ChrisChris ThompsonMemberLate to the party, but 2 points:
1/ Very unusual to see “left-hand = odd” pagination in publications that read left-to-right, regardless of geogrpahy, unless there’s a really specific reason, like the spreads are being displayed on a wall or something like that, and not bound in a book/let.
2/ Other things you might not know about European printing: the conventional direction of the text on the spine of a book can vary by country – here in the UK, the text is right-way-up if the book is flat on a table with the front cover upwards, but all the French and most of the German books I have are the other way round. Maybe there’s a website somewhere with a list, but I haven’t found it!Chris ThompsonMemberDo you need the found text to include the # characters?
And what happens next – change to what? i.e. what would the sample paragraph look like after the find/change?Chris ThompsonMemberWild stabs in the dark/scraping the bottom of the barrel/[insert cliché here]:
1. Possibly different text frame insets under Text Frame Options (Ctrl/Cmd-B)?
2. Different language assigned to the text? (even if the words themselves are the same language as before, maybe it reflows differently if the language assigned in the Character panel is different)
3. Horizontal scaling applied to the text?Chris ThompsonMemberMost professional translators will be able to handle an IDML file in their CAT (Computer Aided Translation) tool, and giving them a PDF of the original will improve the translation process enormously by letting them see the visual context of the words.
It’s likely that the Spanish text will run maybe 15-20% longer that the corresponding English.Chris ThompsonMemberDoes it work with the Object tab of the find and replace? You can specify tints/colours to be replaced there.
It’s a good argument for using table/cell styles, as it’s easy to change a style definition.Chris ThompsonMemberDid you want digits or whole words?
The Middle East versions of InDesign at least let you define which set of digits are used for numbered lists, including an option ‘Farsi digits’ with the 4, 5, and 6 different from the Arabic ones.
So you can change from 1, 2, 3 to ? ? ? etc. Of course that didn’t work on the forum software, but I typed the same digits as used on, for example, https://www.languagesandnumbers.com/how-to-count-in-persian/en/fas/
But there’s no option to define your own whole words.Chris ThompsonMemberHeavy sigh indeed. You’d think there would be a way of differentiating the special space from the normal one.
In desperation, try a GREP search instead?
And there’s definitely nothing there in the Word doc when you turn invisibles on?Chris ThompsonMemberIf you look in Story Editor, do the space characters show up there? Maybe as some kind of marker. If so, you might be able to copy the marker from Story Editor, then paste it into a find and replace to get rid of them.
Alternatively, if you convert one of the tables to text in InDesign, does the character show up then, allowing you to copy-find-replace?
Good luck,
Chris.Chris ThompsonMemberYes, those “insane floating boxes” are not my choice of layout tool, but you have to work with what you’re given sometimes.
They’re a pain even if you’re just editing in Word:
– text flying in all directions at the slightest provocation
– words randomly showing up or not in searches and word counts according to which version of Word it is
– and favoured by one of the PDF-to-Word converters that I come across a lot in the translation business
Don’t get me started – oh, I did already!Chris ThompsonMemberCan we ask why? Is it for artistic reasons, or to achieve some technical purpose?
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