english and hebrew text fonts

Forum|Forum|8 months ago
July 17, 2025
2 replies
278 views

how can I chose 2 different fonts for paragraphs one for english and one for hebrew for a paragraph which contains both languages?

Type

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

When I have a paragraph that is Mostly Hebrew (or Arabic, or for that matter any language that is not written in Latin script) with a few English words here and there, then I usually make a Hebrew paragraph style, and an English character style. In the opposite case - Mostly Hebrew/Arabic/etc with a smattering of English - I make a Hebrew paragraph style with an English character style.

It is usually fastest to make a GREP Style inside the Paragraph Style to automate applying the character style. It can get tricky, depending on the content. So e.g. a character style that specified my preferred English font and English language to all of the characters in the English alphabet would work - so long as there were no parentheses, or other bidirectional punctuation, to complicate matters. I can describe some generic cases and post some GREP query examples, if that would be helpful.

H

hendy_5450Author

Inspiring

yes, thank you.

how would I create a grep style for all hebrew words in english paragraphs?

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

Well, there's a few ways to go about it. First off, make sure that you have made a character style that applies a Hebrew font and Hebrew language:

Then make a paragraph style for English, one that has a GREP Style that applies your Hebrew character style:

The bit in the "To Text:" field is

\p{Lo}

which means "any letter that is not in Latin script." If you have any other scripts in your document (Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic, literally anything) then they will also be captured by \p{Lo}.

If you might have other writing systems, or if you need to tweak exactly which glyphs are caught and which ones aren't, we could build a more finicky GREP query that should only capture Hebrew-specific glyphs (also a few glyphs only used to write Yiddish😞

[\x{0590}-\x{05FF}|\x{FB1D}-\x{FB4F}]+

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

Hi Hendy,

You will likely have to use Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer in your paragraph styles. Can you separate the two languages into two paragraphs? That way, each language can have its own paragraph style and proper reading direction.

Here is some relevant info:

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/arabic-hebrew.html

and also...

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/adding-text-frames.html

Mike Witherell

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