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NChu
Participant
July 28, 2022
Answered

Help with typing an English number (for manual footnote) next to left parenthesis in Arabic

  • July 28, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 488 views

I have a document I'm laying out in Arabic, and my original English design used manual footnotes so I could control the placement more easily. I've found that I cannot insert the footnote next to the left parenthesis when it contains English letters. Please see attached, in which I placed the number with a text box to show what I'm trying to do (and you can see a normally-inserted one in the same screenshot), and the second image shows what happens when I try to insert the number on the left (it jumps to the right and also makes the left parenthesis move).

 

- It works if it's just English letters without parentheses

- It works if it's Arabic letters with parentheses

- It works if inserting number on the other side of the right parenthesis, but I don't want that, I want to do it the way it's done in the Word doc

- It works with "insert footnote" option but I really don't want to use this as I'd have to insert ALL of them then hide them all to manually do my preferred placement

- No amount of adding spaces affects it, so I don't think it's from incorrect cursor placement

 

What's the reason for this?

 

**I do not actually read Arabic, if that matters to the answer.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Joel Cherney

Well, if you're on CS6, then you might want to look at some old scripts that let you set character and paragraph direction. When I used CS6, I had a license for World Tools Pro, which was incredibly helpful when I needed to change the direction of a single character., or do layouts that included both Arabic and Chinese. Placing the documents will set the paragraph direction to RTL, for sure, but if you want character-level control (as you'd need when dealing with numerals and parentheses and Latin-script acronyms) then you would need either Even More Clever Workarounds, or perhaps some assistance from a script or plugin. 

1 reply

Joel Cherney
Community Expert
Joel CherneyCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 28, 2022

We just had a big discussion about this, a few weeks back. I've linked you directly to my post, but the whole thread is worth reading, I think. The really short version is: if you're using the Middle East version of InDesign, you can assign text direction to characters. If you're not, then you really can't lay out the Arabic without a bunch of tedious workarounds. If you need tedious workarounds, let us know.  

    N
    NChuAuthor
    Participant
    July 28, 2022

    Thanks, I'll check the thread! I've done an Arabic layout before without any workarounds, but I checked the previous document and this very specific thing—parentheses containing English letters with a number added to the left—did not come up in that one, so I didn't notice. Everything else worked fine in the previous document.

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