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Participant
January 29, 2026
Question

English and Arabic version at same time

  • January 29, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 29 views

Hello, I know this has been asked before, but I have a specific workflow issue. I have one client document that requires the ME (Middle Eastern) version of InDesign, while the rest of my work uses the standard version. Currently, I have to uninstall and reinstall InDesign just to switch between versions.

I tried creating a separate user profile to install the ME version there, but it affected my primary user profile as well. This issue was discussed 8 years ago—is there a solution yet that would allow me to avoid the constant cycle of uninstalling, changing language settings, and reinstalling?

    1 reply

    Joel Cherney
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    January 29, 2026

    I usually use the ME edition of InDesign to do work in, well, in any language. There’s no real reason I can think of to uninstall and reinstall. The default settings for a new document in the ME edition are set up for starting new documents in a right-to-left language, sure, but you can change all of those with no documents open and all new documents should inherit all of those settings. Happy to go into details about how I’ve set that up, if you are interested.

     

    There certainly are many ways to run more than one language installation of InDesign, but I usually see them in use where you’d actually need to have multiple versions installed - for example, if your primary languages were Japanese and Hebrew. Solutions in these cases are usually operating-system dependent. If you’re using a Mac, you can make a second user and install your second preferred version in the second user and use Fast User Switching. The fact that you said that you tried a separate user profile already makes me wonder if maybe you’re a Windows user? (I don’t know what InDesign does during an installation that would affect multiple user accounts but that is certainly something that happens with Windows installers.)

     

    Mac users can also edit plists to change locale, and Windows users can edit the registry  - if this somewhat hacky solution appeals to you, here’s a Reddit thread describing how to do so to switch locale to Chinese. I’m sure that it wouldn’t be hard to find similar values for English and Arabic locales. 


    But solution that I prefer for someone in your situation, assuming you’re a Windows user, is this one - you can simply make a copy of the program folder and give it the correct locale ID. - like en_US for English (US), or ar_SA for Arabic (Saudi Arabia), or he_IL for Hebrew (Israel). 

    MaearlyAuthor
    Participant
    January 29, 2026

    Thank you for the reply Joel you seem very knowledgeable about this. My only issue with using the ME for both is that you have to set your preferred language to Arabic for the adobe programs and I don’t know how that will affect my other documents or programs, if at all! Also, i am on a Mac.

    Joel Cherney
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    January 30, 2026

     َThe last time I used Fast User Switching to keep my Middle Eastern install separate from my en_US install on a Mac was maybe 2018, so perhaps that method doesn’t work anymore? I also wonder if the trick of duplicating app folders and editing the application.xml works on a Mac, but I don’t have a Mac to experiment on at this point. 

     

    It’s true that leaving your language preference in Creative Cloud as e.g. English (Hebrew) will result in unintentional installations of other Adobe apps with RTL stuff enabled. It will also lead to non-English help files if you should ever accidentally (or purposefully) whack F1. My solution for this was to turn automatic updates off and only change the language to English (Arabic) when I was running an InDesign update by hand.