I wonder - are you using the Data Merge tool that is part of InDesign? Or are you maybe using some kind of third-party plugin or tool. Because there's a very easy answer if 1) you're using the same Data Merge panel that is part of InDesign, and 2) all you're merging in is the review data, then there's a handy tool to "Update content in merged fields":   But if you're a TypeFi user, or an InData user, and/or if your data merge process is actually building large parts of your document (not just the reviews) then just updating the merged fields won't work for you. That's what I am getting from your description - the Data Merge assembles the entire document in rough form, and then you need to put significant effort into finalizing it, so simply updating the data field content would most likely set the clock back and undo a lot of the finalization-effort you'd just put in.     If I were in your offices, consulting on workflow design, I would most likely say that the problem is actually upstream from you; it'd be better to fix how the document is assembled, so you didn't have this post-cleanup step. I might also argue for a commercial solution - e.g. building your catalog with a tool like InData or InCatalog, instead of doing it all with InDesign's vanilla Data Merge tool - but either argument would require a deeper understanding of your workflow than we're likely to get by just conversing on a forum.  So maybe the layer-copying dodge really is the fastest way to get to a completed project?  ... View more

That is a limitation of copying and pasting in InDesign, but it wouldn't be hard to work around that limitation in a script. I can imagine making an array of all pages in the source doc, verifying that you had an open target doc with the correct number of pages, then looping through those pages one by one, copying all of the content in the specified layer, pasting it into the corresponding layer on the corresponding page of the target doc. I wouldn't guess that this would be the easiest way to do it - I'm not looking at your entire workflow, so I might well be wrong about that - but it's absolutely doable.    Is it just numerical data that needs to be updated at the end of production? "4.5 stars, 382 votes" or something along those lines? How do the new star-counts get delivered to you? Lots of possible automation possibilities there... e.g. the numbers of stars and numbers of votes could be stored in placed-and-linked text files. Update those text files, then the next time you open the INDD and are prompted to update links, and all of those files would get updated. Or you could tag every review with XML tags, then Import XML with new values whenever your reviews get updated?      ... View more

I actually can't reproduce that at all, oddly enough. Are you using tatechuyoko? I'm guessing not - as it doesn't matter what font I pick or what numeral style I use, my 1s line up correctly:   Ehh, on second thought, perhaps the Arial Narrow and Proxima Nova examples are pushed a little bit to far to the right, I think. But if you've turned tatechuyoko on, it'll basically behave as if it is centered, which seems to be closer to what you'd want. Additionally, your preferred font seems to have a very short serif/ear/what would you call that stroke, anyways? so I imagine it'd render closer to the centerline than any of the examples I picked out.  ... View more

The setting to control what Peter's talking about is in the dialog when you start your file, but you can also find it in the Document Setup menu, File -> Document Setup -> Binding. (In the GIF below, I use Control+Alt+P instead of navigating to the menu with the mouse.)    This will move the spine to the right, and correctly paginate your document, without using a script: ... View more

mutlipageimporter places/shifts the pages content in reverse order but do not actually reverse the pages number.  ..your page1 stays to be page1 and also your last page stays numbered the same way..    I guess I have two questions, then. First is a compound question: "Why does that matter? What are you trying to do?" Seems like you're asking for something impossible, and we might be able to help you better if we understood why this seemingly impossible thing is a requirement. The thread I pointed out to you covered a particular use case - that of a book with two covers. I've made this myself a few times recently - a couple bidirectional English/Japanese comic books, for example. My question is in the same ballpark as @Peter Spier 's question, I think: why does ID's internal page numbering matter to your final product?   Second question is, "Is this a picture you faked up in Photoshop, or is this actually a picture of a real INDD file? Because this looks impossible:"      This reminds me of conversations I had more than a decade ago, about making "impossible" InDesign files by either editing IDML and reimporting, or by just writing one's own IDML from scratch. I don't know of any way to achieve this page order in InDesign using the UI, or using scripting - that doesn't mean it's not possible, it's just not something I've ever seen.  ... View more

Japanese fonts show up by themselves in their own category in the Fonts drop-down - you may have to scroll further than you would expect in order to find them.    That being said, it's clear that Hiragano is working in InDesign. Try copying your Japanese characters, then selecting all of the word "domani" and pasting. It's not a great workflow but it should prove that the Japanese glyphs are rendering correctly. ... View more

Heiti SC is for Simplified Chinese. It's not useful for typesetting Japanese at all.    If you scroll down in your Font Book a bit, you'll see Hiragino Sans or Hiragino Mincho; those are Japanese fonts that came preinstalled in MacOS. Those should work in InDesign without issue. I don't see any Japanese text, broken or otherwise, in your screenshots.     I need to compose some text in Japanese,   Do you mean "I need to write some text in Japanese" or do you mean "I need to lay out some text in Japanese?"  The tool that InDesign uses to render text is called "the composer" and the thing that you'd most likely need from those templates I linked to previously is called "the J Composer" for laying out Japanese text. Italian InDesign (or English InDesign, for that matter) is bound to get the line endings wrong without access to the J Composer.   If you have some Japanese text in another file, you can File -> Place that file into InDesign, and you should be able to select some of the text with the Text tool and mark it as e.g. Hiragino Mincho and it should at least correctly display the Japanese text. Let us know what goes wrong in that process, and we should be able to figure out what you'd need to do to get it to work correctly.    Once you have the text successfully laid out, do you have a Japanese reader to review your work?      ... View more

I think we might need some more details before we can really help you effectively.    Are you using an English-language install of InDesign? If so, do you have templates or scripts for applying the J Composer? Do you have experience setting Japanese type?    Can you take a screenshot, or describe what's going wrong in more detail? How can you be sure that the font is loaded correctly?  ... View more

Here's a thread that describes two different strategies - either using the MultiPageImporter script to place one InDesign file into another in reverse order, or by specifying reverse page order (i.e. 6,5,4,3,2,1) in the Range field of the PDF export dialog.  ... View more

That doesn't really fit the topic of the question here, because the OP was specifically seeking translation solutions that didn't require transmission of their files offsite. That translation plugin sends your text off-premises to....     ChatGPT Integration: Uses OpenAI's advanced AI models for high-quality translations   There are some excellent machine translation tools available. This is not one of them. OpenAI's large language models are, in my experience, an abysmally awful choice for general-purpose document translation.   It'd be better to pick something that is relevant in some way to your content. Even if you can't do that, you can use an AI translation service that uses a large language model that has been groomed for the purposes of translation, and is maintained by an entity that has a great deal of experience maintaining databases for use in translation workflows. I've been consistently sending people over to DeepL, where they build their LLM out of the translation memory databases they'd been carefully maintaining for many years.  ... View more

I've had similar problems, and in my case the fix was this:   Cache gelöscht   How do you clear the cache? Did you 1) Reset InDesign preferences  2) Log out of Creative Cloud on every machine 2) Hard restart 3) Clear OS font caches  4) Hard restart again    I think that maybe "2) Hard restart" isn't totally necessary - although 4) is absolutely necessary.     ... View more

I can't say, from looking at your screenshot, why that particular percentage symbol looks like it is still exhibiting  LTR behavior. Maybe you could post a sample INDD displaying this behavior? It might be a bug, but it may well be "functioning as designed." I can't recreate the behavior in your screenshot on my side:     so I suspect that there are other elements in your layout that are influencing behavior.    Other Adobe apps and even Microsoft Word render this correctly, so it looks like a specific bug in InDesign’s RTL text engine. I think that directionality of glyphs that can render as either RTL or LTR has behaved consistently in this way for, in my experience, almost twenty years? Since at least CS2 ME, back when the Middle Eastern editions were developed by Winsoft.    If you can demonstrate that there's a bug, you can report it at indesign.uservoice.com, but I think you'd need to offer perhaps some screen recordings and a sample file to make that case - and I think that if you posted your sample file here, we could figure out why it was rendering incorrectly after being marked with RTL text direction. You're currently posting to what amounts to a user-to-user forum - sometimes an Adobe employee will notice your thread and file the bug report on your behalf, but the only way to ensure that a bug report is filed is to file it yourself. But mostly what you're going to encounter here is people like me, who are not Adobe employees, but who are end-users like you.   Manually running Find/Change across long documents isn’t practical and doesn’t reliably fix the problem.    When I'm working in a right-to-left language and have client requirements for particular behaviors around numerals that diverge from InDesign's default behavior (e.g. "The client wants the numerals in the Farsi translation to stay in Persian numerals, unless they're phone numbers or regulatory statutes, in which case the client wants Arabic numerals used") then I typically write some GREP Styles in the paragraph style to automatically apply character styles to particular patterns of numbers. That helps avoid the drudgery of manual treatment of numerals, parentheses, etc. throughout a document.  ... View more

Well, in Abhishek's defense, I had the advantage of actually having your INDD file, instead of guessing blindly and suggesting statistically likely causes 😄   There were a few such spots, such as empty carriage returns that were marked as Arabic, and nonbreaking spaces that were marked as Hebrew, that kind of thing. Not really sure how those crept in - I personally like pointing the accusatory finger at MS Word.  ... View more

If you set the language to Arabic and the direction to Default, then you should get RTL text with LTR numerals. The percentage sign might require special treatment, for a few reasons that wouldn't be important when it comes to selecting the easiest fix: to do a Find/Change on all percentage signs, applying Right-to-Left Direction from the Change Format tool: If you really want the deep backstory on why your percentage signs are aligning as if they're LTR, just let me know. The short version is that your percentage sign is between an Arabic numeral (default LTR direction) and a parenthesis (which is bidirectional in InDesign) and InDesign's composer looks at 'em both and says "This percentage sign is right in the middle of an LTR run, it clearly should be LTR too". If you switched to Hindi numerals, the percentage symbol would lay out RTL.      ... View more

Unfortunately, I think that you have to share it with me before I can download it. (I responded to your DM with basically that message.) ... View more

Thank you. Ran it and it says it's already LTR. No luck. I started a document from scratch.   Depending on how much work it'll be for you to rebuild from scratch, it might be worth looking to see if you had an accidental right-to-left story (you can tell by looking at the text frame - the input and output ports will be in the wrong place) or something marked unintentionally as Arabic (a paragraph style, especially one related to text that began its life in MS Word).    I'd be happy to eyeball your INDD file - it'd take all of three minutes. You can DM me for my email address.  Otherwise, I hope your rebuild goes well.  ... View more

This option is not even available under DOCUMENT SETUP.  Where do we find "text direction" in InDesign?   The option probably isn't available in your localization of InDesign. You're probably using US English, right? If you'd downloaded a Middle East version, you'd know it, and if you went to the Page Setup you could change the value:     This is a bug that I see here periodically, where users report that their document is behaving in some kind of right-to-left way, without any idea how it got set up that way.  This script will check for right-to-left binding and set it to left-to-right, as your English localization of InDesign is only missing the UI elements that would allow you to control this setting.    #target indesign var doc = app.activeDocument; if (doc.documentPreferences.pageBinding == PageBindingOptions.RIGHT_TO_LEFT) { // Document is currently set to right-to-left binding alert("Document is set to Right-to-Left binding.\nChanging to Left-to-Right binding..."); // Change to left-to-right binding doc.documentPreferences.pageBinding = PageBindingOptions.LEFT_TO_RIGHT; alert("Successfully changed document binding to Left-to-Right."); } else if (doc.documentPreferences.pageBinding == PageBindingOptions.LEFT_TO_RIGHT) { // Document is already set to left-to-right binding alert("Document is already set to Left-to-Right binding.\nNo changes needed."); }    ... View more

I always derive lasting satisfaction from upvoting somebody else's localization bug report.   ... View more

UMMM.. in your post abpve you said the last character was "[", but now you say "]" which, if that's really what it is, explains why the GREP doesn't work and chaning to \S+(?=\]$) should take care of it unless there's a conflict with the bracket characters being different for Hebrew or Arabic.   We're going to have to wait until SuzzyFlamingo posts tomorrow, of course, but I think you probably nailed it here, Peter. Because bracket characters, like periods or parentheses, can be bidirectional in InDesign. We don't know if the close bracket character at the end of the line is a [ or a ] as its directionality depends on the language selected, the Character Direction setting, how it was keyed, what the paragraph direction is, and so on. Too many variables! When I build similar GREP queries, to process my translators' work, I'm more likely to use something like  \S+(?=\]$|\[$)  which will catch either [ or ]. That's because I don't know whether my translator rekeyed the whole line, including brackets, or if they just typed over the English with their Arabic/Hebrew/Persian/etc., or if they rekeyed the whole line but switched keyboards back to English just to key the brackets, or any one of a number of possibilities.      ... View more

Glazing is meant to make your images less useful to sometime feeding them to AI for mimicry purposes. Probably not strictly necessary in your case, but it belongs in the same toolkit as watermarking -a tool to consider if you are going to distribute your proprietary information, and fear that it will be distributed without your permission. I can't guess what kind of images you have that your translator may or may not need to see, but if they are diagrams or line art or etc., then probably glazing isn't hugely useful for you.    At the scale you describe, it makes a lot of sense to me to make your images less useful to piracy by making low resolution watermarked images. You'd be trying to make reuse or piracy inconvenient or unprofitable, not impossible.  ... View more

That's a good argument in favor of going with a freelancer. However, I remain slightly skeptical about anyone who starts talking about a freelance translator without also talking about the freelance editor, and additionally how they can handle the QA and/or post-layout proofing in house. Here in a discussion group focused on InDesign, the idea that the post-translation layout can be handled by the posters themselves is comparatively uncontroverisal (although there are abundant counterexamples). But the whole rest of the workflow is not mentioned at all, and Translation + Edit + Proofread is the ground-floor basic translation workflow. I suppose you could also have Machine Translation + Post MT Edit + Proofread, but you're still talking about a workflow that can't be sourced from a single human being.    All that being said, I'm quite accustomed to the workflow that looks more like One Freelancer in China + The Designer Who Doesn't Read Chinese Lays Out the Translation + The Bilingual Coworker Who Moved to the US in High School Proofs from PDF And Also Suggests A Few Edits. It's just not something I can reccomend to strangers on the Internet, not when I know how it's properly done.      ... View more

This is great advice, although usually it's better for people shopping for translation to go to a firm instead of selecting their own freelancer. It's comparatively hard to know how to build your own trusted translation workflow, and easy to find a reputable firm that will, upon request, use translation suppliers that are e.g. all located in the US.   Honestly, the only secure means to achieve what you want is to have your language suppliers literally onsite. You know, the kind of secure facility that requires you to leave your electronic devices in lockers at the front desk?    If you don't need that level of security, you're probably just ham-stringing your translation supplier. Without knowing nearly enough about what you are doing to make a real suggestion, I'd say that you ought to just watermark and glaze your images, and hope that your translation supplier is not also selling your data elsewhere. Or alternately halt the project, write it down as a learning experience, and find a language services provider that can meet your requirements. Three are industries that have legal requirements to use only translation suppliers located in the States, it's not a hard service to find.     ... View more

Well, I think we'd have to wait for my hypothetical forums regular who regularly works with Canva-produced PDFs in some way besides immediately ripping them into their component pieces and recreating them in InDesign, to get the answer you're looking for. (Canva doesn't support many of the languages I work in.)   But the PDF spec allows for documents to be built in any number of ways, and it's not something that we as end users of the tools can typically control. But here I am, using the Edit PDF tool trying to delete the word "CREATOR":     I wouldn't know how to rebuild the document to prevent this from happening, but I'm pretty sure that this is the problem. If you select that text and paste it elsewhere, you'll see that according to Acrobat that text says  CUSTOM CRSTOEATOLER and the words "stole creator" if you removed their extensive tracking & baseline adjustment, would look like this: STO LE CR EATO R I suppose that they could flatten PDFs that were going to print? But the real answer, in my book, is "don't let Canva PDFs go to print."    ... View more

This is not the first posting we've seen, around here, regarding problems with objects in Canva-produced PDFs. Even if you were savvy with advanced print production tools in Acrobat, I'd advise you that your most efficient path forward, time-wise, will most likely be rebuilding that document from the ground up in another application.    Edit: it's possible that someone who actually is working with customer-supplied Canva files might have some more useful suggestions, so please do understand my comment as being made not by someone who regularly massages clients' Canva PDFs into a print workflow, but by someone who got burned, this one time.  ... View more

1. How can I make sure that all files added to the book follow the same footnotes settings regarding space from text, divider etc  2. Also I want to force that at the beginning of each chapter the numbering of the footnotes  restarts to 1.   Footnotes are a document-level feature, so one way would be to set up a single InDesign file with your preferred footnote settings, save that as a template file (INDT), and then base each chapter off of that template file. That works great when you have zero chapter files and are going to set about creating them. But if you already have seventy chapters all laid out, then it's comparatively laborious to go through each file and fix the footnote settings by hand.    But adjusting document footnote options with a script is comparatively easy.  var doc = app.activeDocument; var footnoteOptions = doc.footnoteOptions; footnoteOptions.startAt = 1; footnoteOptions.ruleOn = true;   That script silently changes the footnote options in the active document to start at 1 and turns on the divider. The full range of options available is here: https://www.indesignjs.de/extendscriptAPI/indesign-latest/#FootnoteOption.html  ... View more

but almost all of the others which give me the same problem don't -- most don't have anything but English words.    Yep, I was absolutely operating under the false assumption that something weird and not in plain-vanilla Latin script - that is, something In My Wheelhouse - was causing your issue.    That being said, one of the rarer InDesign bugs that I've kept an eye out for, the last decade or so, is the occasional case where someone with a US English install of InDesign has some Arabic stuff unintentionally turned on. It's usually not something the user did; the base us_EN install I assume you use has all of the Arabic tools under the hood, so you can use the same INDD files that I generate with my Arabic/English install, but you don't have to see all of the right-to-left tools in your interface.  So sometimes damaged preferences can cause issues similar to this one, where something Arabic gets turned on under the hood, but your interface doesn't have a UI element to turn it off.  Sometimes, the fix for this rare bug is to reset all of your preferences. In other cases, a one-line script (to e.g. fix a spurious right-to-left paragraph setting in the [Basic Paragraph Style]) can resolve the issue.    Probably better to wait for other regulars, who might make epubs more frequently than myself, to sound off regarding your issue. I'm clearly still stuck In My Wheelhouse, saying "but maybe it's this other rare thing that only happens when complex scripts are involved!" (Alternately I still invite you to post a sample epub, and ideally the sample indd used to generate said epub, to see if we can track down a real spurious Arabic thing somewhere in your default settings.) ... View more

Well, the pink highlighting indicates that the italic part has dropped, right? You can use that to your advantage.   My example here happens to be in Pashto, but it works in English just as well. If the English was typeset in Helvetica Neue, then all of the book-names would have fonts like "Helvetica Neue 57 Condensed Oblique" applied. So if I changed all the fonts to Noto Sans Arabic, then the italic bits would be named "Noto Sans Arabic 57 Condensed Oblique." Of course, Noto Sans doesn't have italics named in this way, so it shows up as a dropped font - with pink highlight, and with brackets around the "57 Condensed Oblique" part.   Like so:   You can use this because the "[57 Condensed Oblique]" part shows up as a separate face in the Format section of the Find/Change window: ... View more

There is no Arabic in the project, although in many cases there are words in other languages (Hawaiian, and another South Pacific language....) and diacritical marks such as a macron are there also.    I don't do much epub work - and when I do, InDesign is rarely involved - so I honestly don't know that much about why this is happening. However, I'm in the last stage of a project where it was important for me to have the Marshallese, Palauan, Pohnpeian, Chuukese, and Kosraean interactive PDFs language-tagged. So if it's necessary, I can show you how to add language tags for e.g. Māori to InDesign.   I also know that getting the language tags correct for multilingual epub export is important, and I have just checked out the preferences under File -> File Info, and the EPUB Export preferences, and the File Information dialog, and the epub export settings that you can find when you right-click on an object and select "Object Export Settings." I didn't find anything language-related in any of those places. That is in line with my assumption that the only place you can affect language settings is in paragraph and character styles. If you have Hawaiian or Māori or whatever in your epub, and you don't want to go throught the process of adding those tags to InDesign, those words should probably be marked with character styles having "[No Language]".   (Or alternately, you could tag all your Māori as another language Romanian, and then edit your CSS after export? But I'm going to tag @James Gifford—NitroPress in to your thread, as he's the forums regular I know to be expert in epub export from InDesign, and he always says that post-export editing shouldn't be necessary. Honestly I wouldn't know, as I am constantly elbow-deep in raw text formats manually editing Things That Experts Agree Oughtn't Be Edited Manually. I'm ready to be told by James that I'm doing it wrong, for what it's worth.)   So: do you consistently have styles applied throughout your document to all text, without overrides? Have you specified the language in each one? Do you maybe have a spurious Arabic tag appended somewhere in your template or base styles? Do you (kinda reaching, here) have a Middle East/North African install of InDesign for doing right-to-left work? Are you willing to share a sample epub that is flagging as "Arabic, English" for me to rip open, contra James' advice, to find where spurious "Arabic" bits may be hiding? ... View more