Devanagari & Gujarati Script issue from 2024-2025

Question

Check the first line, it is very tight (no spacing). This is in Indesign 2024 & 2025.

Now check this, same text in Indesign 2023

Here the spacing is proper. To get this type of setting in 2025 we have to turn on the Enable legacy in Advacnced Type

I am also attaching a sample indd. How to fix this in newer versions of indesign without relying on the legacy option, as it wont be around for long?

Joel Cherney · Accepted Answer

Thanks for the example; it's not a language I've worked in recently. I find it odd that the Mukta Vaani font you're using only works when it's not marked with the appropriate language. I tried a variety of other Gujarati fonts, and none of them behaved in this way. The fonts that rendered differently under different text shaping engines dropped the combining mark when the Legacy Text Shaping engine was turned on. So Mukta Vaani is the outlier, here. How important is it to you to use this font in particular? Can you reproduce the same issue with a different font? Can you reproduce this issue in another application that uses the same Harfbuzz text shaping engine? (I can't, for what it's worth; so long as I don't mark the text as Gujarati, this font seems to work fine in Scribus.)

To jump to the end of this conversation, if it can be demonstrated that this is a problem with the way that InDesign in particular is handling this font, and that it's not a problem with the font, then the way to ask for a bugfix is to go to indesign.uservoice.com and submit a bug report there. Gathering votes for your post there is the fastest way to get this issue in front of the eyes of the developers.

Joel Cherney · Answer

In your sample, you have the text marked as English. Once marked as Gujarati, the spacing of the text is identical in either text shaping engine, in both 2023 and 2025. That's demonstrated in the first half of the GIF I captured.

There are still a few things that render differently in the two different text shaping engines, though. I couldn't tell you which was correct, but there are plenty of differences between the two text shaping engines. I was going to point them all out with arrows until I figured out how many there were (quite a few!):

Are you able to tell us which rendering is correct?

I'm looking around for a way to third-party test harfbuzz against InDesign rendering, so it's easy to tell when it's a problem with harfbuzz and when it's an InDesign problem. It seems that Scribus uses harfbuzz, so I'll take a look at your sample text there, once I get a chance to install it.

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