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Inspiring
June 17, 2025
Answered

Hindi and Korean fonts

  • June 17, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 653 views

I'm doing a layout for a book that is primarily in English but also has some passages in a dozen other languages. No problem with any fonts from the original Word doc for most of the other languages, except Nirmala UI (Hindi) and Malgun Gothic (Korean) - when I place the chapters that include passages in those fonts, I get an error message saying Adobe doesn't support them, and the characters appear as pink blanks on the screen.

 

Does anyone have any suggestions for alternate fonts for these languages that Adobe does support?

 

I'm running inDesign 20.0.1

MacBook Pro

OS Sequoia 15.2

 

Correct answer Eugene Tyson

InDesign is showing pink boxes because Nirmala UI and Malgun Gothic are Windows system fonts and don’t ship natively with macOS. InDesign on Mac can’t access or render them unless you’ve manually installed them (and even then, it’s hit and miss depending on the font licensing and compatibility).

 

Use Adobe Fonts alternatives
Nirmala UI is available on Adobe Fonts - you may need to use this
If it's still not working then for Hindi

Adobe Devanagari 

Siddhanta (Free Google Font)

Lohit Devanagari

 

For Korean:

Adobe Myungjo 

Adobe Gothic Std

Nanum Gothic / Nanum Myeongjo (free Google Fonts)

 

You can activate these directly from Adobe Fonts via Creative Cloud.

 

Use Google Fonts
Google Fonts has solid multilingual font support. These are free, cross-platform, and often reliable in InDesign:

Hindi: Noto Sans Devanagari, Noto Serif Devanagari

Korean: Noto Sans KR, Nanum Gothic


Download and install the fonts, restart InDesign, and reapply them in your paragraph or character styles.

 

 

Ensure World-Ready Composer is active in InDesign (especially for Hindi). Go to Paragraph panel > flyout menu > Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer (and also set this in the Paragraph Styles)

 

If text still doesn’t render right, check the language setting in the Character panel to match the script. This influences hyphenation and shaping.

 

 

1 reply

Eugene TysonCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
June 18, 2025

InDesign is showing pink boxes because Nirmala UI and Malgun Gothic are Windows system fonts and don’t ship natively with macOS. InDesign on Mac can’t access or render them unless you’ve manually installed them (and even then, it’s hit and miss depending on the font licensing and compatibility).

 

Use Adobe Fonts alternatives
Nirmala UI is available on Adobe Fonts - you may need to use this
If it's still not working then for Hindi

Adobe Devanagari 

Siddhanta (Free Google Font)

Lohit Devanagari

 

For Korean:

Adobe Myungjo 

Adobe Gothic Std

Nanum Gothic / Nanum Myeongjo (free Google Fonts)

 

You can activate these directly from Adobe Fonts via Creative Cloud.

 

Use Google Fonts
Google Fonts has solid multilingual font support. These are free, cross-platform, and often reliable in InDesign:

Hindi: Noto Sans Devanagari, Noto Serif Devanagari

Korean: Noto Sans KR, Nanum Gothic


Download and install the fonts, restart InDesign, and reapply them in your paragraph or character styles.

 

 

Ensure World-Ready Composer is active in InDesign (especially for Hindi). Go to Paragraph panel > flyout menu > Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer (and also set this in the Paragraph Styles)

 

If text still doesn’t render right, check the language setting in the Character panel to match the script. This influences hyphenation and shaping.

 

 

Inspiring
June 19, 2025

Thank you so much for all of this info -