Composite Fonts for Western InDesign?

Question

Our marketing department, located in the USA, creates documents using InDesign in many different languages, including CJK. To meet our corporate design requirements, we need to create composite fonts. Unfortunately, the western version of InDesign does not yet have a composite font editor. Oddly, Illustrator does, but exporting the Illustrator Composite font into the Western InDesign does not work. We also used to be able to use the composite font editor in World Tools Pro, but that has not been updated to be compatible with recent versions of InDesign.

Currently, we open old documents with a composite Japanese font that we created when we were using World Tools Pro, and as long as we have that document open, we can use the composite font in a new document. Nonetheless, it is a bit tricky and we want to create composite fonts for other languages (Chinese and Korean).

I really don't know why Adobe still thinks only users of the ME and CJK versions of InDesign need the composite font editor. Or, at the very least, to be able to import composite fonts from Illustrator into the Western version of InDesign. I doubt we are the only company with this issue.

When might Adobe give us composite font capabilities in the Western version of InDesign?

Steve Werner · Accepted Answer

This is the wrong place for this kind of request. Feature requests for InDesign should be posted on InDesign User Voice:

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601021-adobe-indesign-feature-requests

Start by searching for previous requests, and you'll find some there to vote for.

Caleb Clauset · Answer

FontMixer and World Tools Pro both use the same underlying scripting interface to provide an alternative user interface to the "missing" Composite Fonts editor for Roman editions of InDesign. The challenge you'll encounter with FontMixer for creating CCJK composite fonts is the interface is built around a simple base + one (1) alternate font for any characters manually keyed into a single-line field. Whereas World Tools Pro closely emulated InDesign J's Composite Fonts Editor (where you can assign fonts to six pre-defined Unicode character ranges: Kanji, Kana, Punctuation, Symbols, Latin, and Numbers).

But you can enable the "missing" Font Composite Editor in InDesign CC by Changing the language of your Creative Cloud apps (link), then re-installing InDesign (you used to have to un-install InDesign first, but that's no longer the case).

If you choose English Arabic or English Hebrew as your default install language, InDesign's user interface will remain in English, but the Composite Font Editor (go to Type > Composite Fonts…) is more limited with only three pre-defined Unicode character ranges of Base, Latin, and Numbers.

If you choose Japanese, InDesign's user interface will be fully localized, but the Composite Font Editor is what you're expecting.

I don't quite understand why Adobe doesn't make the Hebrew/Arabic variant of the Composite Fonts Editor available to all install languages. But one feature that I'd love to have would being able to define custom Unicode character ranges instead of being limited to the preset options or having to directly key in each glyph individually (painful).

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