Japanese font management in InDesign

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Hi everyone, I have a problem with InDesign. I need to compose some text in Japanese, but with the font loaded correctly, it doesn't display the ideograms. Thanks to anyone who can help me.

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Dadot_71Correct answer

Inspiring

Japanese fonts show up by themselves in their own category in the Fonts drop-down - you may have to scroll further than you would expect in order to find them.

That being said, it's clear that Hiragano is working in InDesign. Try copying your Japanese characters, then selecting all of the word "domani" and pasting. It's not a great workflow but it should prove that the Japanese glyphs are rendering correctly.

Thank you so much! I actually had an InDesign page sent to me with some Japanese text already in it, so it recognized it and I could retype my own.
Thanks for your help.

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

I think we might need some more details before we can really help you effectively.

Are you using an English-language install of InDesign? If so, do you have templates or scripts for applying the J Composer? Do you have experience setting Japanese type?

Can you take a screenshot, or describe what's going wrong in more detail? How can you be sure that the font is loaded correctly?

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Dadot_71Author

Inspiring

No, I'm working with an Italian INDD and have no experience with Japanese characters.

I'm sending screenshots of what I see in the font book and what I see in indd

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Joel Cherney

Community Expert

Heiti SC is for Simplified Chinese. It's not useful for typesetting Japanese at all.

If you scroll down in your Font Book a bit, you'll see Hiragino Sans or Hiragino Mincho; those are Japanese fonts that came preinstalled in MacOS. Those should work in InDesign without issue. I don't see any Japanese text, broken or otherwise, in your screenshots.

I need to compose some text in Japanese,

Do you mean "I need to write some text in Japanese" or do you mean "I need to lay out some text in Japanese?" The tool that InDesign uses to render text is called "the composer" and the thing that you'd most likely need from those templates I linked to previously is called "the J Composer" for laying out Japanese text. Italian InDesign (or English InDesign, for that matter) is bound to get the line endings wrong without access to the J Composer.

If you have some Japanese text in another file, you can File -> Place that file into InDesign, and you should be able to select some of the text with the Text tool and mark it as e.g. Hiragino Mincho and it should at least correctly display the Japanese text. Let us know what goes wrong in that process, and we should be able to figure out what you'd need to do to get it to work correctly.

Once you have the text successfully laid out, do you have a Japanese reader to review your work?

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