Issue with NotoSansCJKsc and NotoSerif sCJKsc Chinese fonts removing spaces in InDesign.

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
January 14, 2025
2 replies
1173 views

Hello, I am in the UK but working on a document in InDesign for a client in China. They have given us their brand fonts ‘NotoSansCJKsc’ and ‘NotoSertif CJKsc’ and I've installed them into our system. However, when I convert the English text to this Noto font, it removes all the spacing around the 'Kenten' characters, despite the spaces being there on the Word Doc supplied by the client (in China). We urgently need to rectify this, why is InDesign or the font removing the spaces in the text? Please help as we are really stuck...

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

I'm willing to bet that they're not space characters.

Are you using a CJK version of InDesign? There are better tools for handling Chinese text there, but if you're an English reader with no background, there's no real need to go and install another version of InDesign in order to fix your issue. If you're familiar with setting CJK text already, you'd appreciate the toolset, but I don't think that said toolset will be necessary in your case. I'm asking because you're talking abount kenten, and I don't see any kenten anywhere here. Kenten are the punctuation marks that go above the characters, in Japanese. You might be thinking about mojikumi? Because one of the issues that is pointed out in your screenshot is compressed punctuation, perhaps?

True CJK InDesign has a kerning feature "Latin Only". It doesn't kern the CJK text (leaving that for your mojikumi settings) but kerns all Latin script text. But if you have any kerning applied at all to Chinese text in Noto Sans SC in your English install of InDesign, it'll render punctuation incorrectly. You'd have to set the Kerning to 0 throughout. Optical and Metric kerning will result in the punctuation compression pointed out in your screenshot. It's a decision/mistake/you-call-it in the Noto Sans font itself. (Your client is using either an old or misnamed version of the font, but getting the lastest versions of Noto Sans SC or TC won't fix your issue.)

D

dannyw95557914Author

Participant

Hi Joel,

Thank you for your detailed response, it was much appreciated by byself and my boss 😊

I didn’t even know that ‘CJK version of InDesign’ is a thing, but did have a suspicion at the back of mind that our client might be on a different platform to us. We are in the UK, so nope, we aren’t using the CJK version and hence there lies our problem. However, we have now clicked on the setting ‘optical’ rather than ‘metric’, and the ‘spaces’ put in the Word Doc by our client seem to be retained now, (in InDesign), but still not as much ‘space’ as on their word doc. But it’s all we can do I suppose.

And yes, we are probably thinking of ‘mojikumi’ – rather than ‘Kenten’, but tbh it’s all Greek to me lol.

Thanks again for replying to my question Joel,

Best Wishes
Zoe

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

Pleased to be of assistance, Zoe.

However, we have now clicked on the setting ‘optical’ rather than ‘metric’, and the ‘spaces’ put in the Word Doc by our client seem to be retained now, (in InDesign), but still not as much ‘space’ as on their word doc. But it’s all we can do I suppose.

The only kerning setting that will get the space around fullwidth Chinese punctuation to match what you see in your Word file is a value of zero. Optical kerning on Chinese punctuation is going to look wrong to your Chinese readership. In fact, I'd argue that Optical kerning on any Chinese text is going to look wrong to your Chinese readership. That's why the CJK version of InDesign has that "Kerning on Latin script only" setting that I mentioned upthread. If you would like, I can help you use the Find/Change dialog, or GREP styles in your Paragraph Styles, to apply Optical kerning to only Latin-script text in your document, and leave all of the CJK text with zero kerning.

Fortunately for you, almost all of the differences between your UK English InDesign and your client's Chinese InDesign, as well as the Middle East edition I use, are in the user interface only. Under the hood (er... what do you call it in the UK? Under the bonnet?), they're almost identical. So you can do your layout in UK EN InDesign and feel completely confident that it will render identically in your client's office. There are some installation tricks by which you could install a CJK version of InDesign with an English interface, which might be advisable if you plan on doing a lot of, er, typographically demanding formatting in Chinese. For a one-off project, if you don't want to deep-dive into culturally appropriate typesetting (including, as you've already noticed, learning a whole new set of terms & techniques), then I think that you could continue doing your layout in UK EN ID without issue.

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @dannyw95557914,

Would you mind sharing the font files with us so we can test them on our end? Along with the fonts, it would be helpful if you could share a sample file with dummy text and, if possible, a screen recording demonstrating the workflow. You can easily package the InDesign file along with the fonts and other assets. Here's a reference: Package Files.

Note: If the file is confidential, you can share it with me via DM on the community.

Best,
Abhishek

Peter Spier

Community Expert

@Abhishek Rao to the best of my recollection CJK fonts are not packaged...

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hello @Peter Spier,

I just tested this out and guess what, you stand corrected. Thank you.

@dannyw95557914, you can share the direct font files for me to install and then test.

Abhishek

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