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Question

Arabic and English text gets rearranged - please help!

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
December 10, 2021
5 replies
11093 views

Hello!
I will try to keep it short and clear. I installed the ME InDesign. I need to copy paste an Arabic text from Word into the InDesign file. This text contains both arabic and roman script, sometimes in the same sentence.

for example:

this is the text in the Word file

this is the InDesign text that I copy pasted

Clearly the order gets mixed up. Now, I have read through every single article possible that is related to this topic, and I have tried all the answers posted there - meaning I do have the following turned on: align right, RTL paragraph direction, character direction: default, digits: arabic, typeface adobe: arabic, character style/language: arabic

I want to note that when I am copying a completely arabic paragraph, it gets pasted perfectly!

Moreover, when I am selecting the mixed script sentence in Word, by dragging the cursos over the sentence to select, if I slow it down, I can see it being selected sporadically until it all gets blue - by that I mean this:

I start selecting RTL - I select the "7)" first but then it skips as shown in the 2nd image

Someone please help me fix this, it is incredibly annoying... even if I copy past word by word, number by number it somehow switches directions, starts typing from another point, etc... like its going crazy

Thank you in advance!

Type

R

rosenh

Known Participant

I'm ready to tear my hair out with this. 2 examples attached.
Top is screenshot of the Word doc.
Bottom is screenshot of how it comes into Indd, whether pasted, placed, or even put into Text and Remove All Formatting before pasting. I can't place the English words where I need them to go.
How can Word do this correctly but InDesign cannot?
Help!!

Zaid Al Hilali

Community Expert

I typed part of your text for testing purposes and all came alright in my InDesign (ME version) with the following settings:

Text frame set to Right-to-Left

Digits (numbers) set to Arabic

Composer set to Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer

Paragraph Direction is set to Right-to-Left

Here is what I got:

Note, I typed the text in InDesign, I didn't copy/paste or place it since I don't have the source file.

I suggest that you delete all Latin text from the source file ie. Word document, then copy/paste the Arabic text into InDesign, then simply type the Latin text in InDesign, I do suspect InDesign is misreading the dashes – and parenthesis ( ) coming from Arabic Word document.

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

That is correct, I don't have the ME version activated. Since this is a rare project, I did manage a workaround without having to reload InDesign! I could never have figured it out without the excellent help offered in this forum!!!
(Sorry, I don't know how to record my workaround steps:)
1) Place (preferred) or paste the RTL text. (Note, it will not be RTL in InDesign, even if it's RTL in Word, until the InDesign paragraph style includes World-Ready Paragraph Composer.)
2) I had already created paragraph styles with the ME-friendly font and included Right Justified and World-Ready Composer (which is found under "Justification")
3) Assign the style, and the text jumps to RTL.
4) For English text within the paragraph, assign a Character Style that includes "English" as the Language (found in the Advanced Character Formats dialog box). This Character Style was also useful because the English text is often much larger than the ME text, so it's nice to make them smaller.
5) Now... highlight the text, and re-type it backwards! This sounds odd, but it really worked.
6) Dashes and Parentheses are problematic... sometimes they caused whole paragraphs to come apart, and I actually put those phrases on their own single line. And sometimes the parentheses worked as expected!

Thank you all again, I couldn't have done it without you.

That is really clever! I can't really endorse the "I just typed the letters backwards" solution, but I totally understand why you used it. I used to use many similar techniques myself, back in The Old Days when the Middle East Edition of InDesign was a separate (expensive) app sold by Winsoft, and I worked in a nonprofit that couldn't afford to buy me a license. The Bad Old Days, I guess.

Today, of course, it's free with your Creative Cloud subscription. But if you don't want to deal with the hassle of reinstalling (or the hassle of asking the IT department to allow such reinstallation), there are a few other hacky workarounds you can use. I'll list a few of the most useful I know about here, in case you, or anyone else, ever need them:

1) All of these RTL behaviors are scriptable. It just takes one line of Javascript to apply RTL character direction or RTL paragraph direction. I haven't tested them since maybe CC 2016, but the RTL scripts posted by Thomas Phinney for CS4 still worked even then. That whole blog post should be saved for posterity, I think.

2) But maybe you just have a single Arabic sentence you need to paste in, and don't want to stop to learn how to install and use these scripts. In that case, you can make a fresh empty text frame, grab the Text tool and click into it for live text, and then go to "Type" and hold down the Control key (on Windows) while you click the "Fill with placeholder text" entry in the menu. Instead of filling the frame with the familiar "Lorem ipsum" text, it will give you a list of optional placeholder text languages, including Arabic! So you can either paste straight into the Arabic, or base a new paragraph style on it that will have the WRC turned on and RTL paragraph direction applied.

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

Everyone posting in your thread is right, but Zaid is right-est, I think:

the best way to get Arabic from MS. Word is by placing it not copy/paste.

That's a command in the File menu, without which you will be using all kinds of crazy workarounds. My own preferred crazy workarounds is to place the Word document, and then use RTL and LTR markers and overrides to force the text to render the way I think it ought to render. There are markers and overrides in Type -> Insert Special ME Character -> Unicode Markers. Sometimes I also have to mark individual spaces as RTL character direction (that's in the flyout menu on the Charater panel) especially when numerals and parentheses and such are involved.

But really, I think that many of your frustrations are coming from attempts to copy & paste bidirectional text. Don't trust the Clipboard!

Zaid Al Hilali

Community Expert

The experience you described is what we have been suffering with it for decades to the extent it became a normal issue for us. Microsoft had localized (Arabized) their Office applications differently to how Adobe did it, add to this Windows OS, and Mac both have again different methods of dealing with Right to Left Languages. That's why we try to minimize the differences in a workflow by trying to work on specific platform Win/Mac and keep the workflow from a single developer such as InCopy for writers and authors, along with InDesign for the rest of designers and page layout staff.

I'm not saying at all that you and us should consider these issues as normal, but I'm saying that we adapted to such behaviours and have developed some workarounds of our own.

In your example you're dealing with short text. If you know Arabic, I advice you of typing the sentence all over in InDesign. Otherwise, the best way to get Arabic from MS. Word is by placing it not copy/paste.

Diane Burns

Inspiring

I don't know if this will help in addition to Willi's reply, but here are some scripts that let you change direction for just 1-2 characters at time. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/dzvkg4iv1vsg6tq/AAC_FlxT4qr55lwNrA0QKd5da?dl=0

Let me know if you have trouble retrieving the files.

Diane Burns

Inspiring

Sorry, meant to add how to install scripts: https://redokun.com/resources/install-an-indesign-script

And I was wondering, would there be any different result overall if you Place the file (File > Place) vs. Copy/Paste from Word? Copy/Paste is, in general, not the best approach. Though it may be necessary in some cases.

Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

Mixed paragraphs with RTL and LTR text are problematic. Only one language direction can be allowed to have a line break. You cannot have line breaks with both languages. Asign to one language a no break property. So these texts must be so short to fit in a line. If that is not possible, breakt it up into several paragraphs.

N

Noa5EE6Author

Participant

Oh I see... well, thank you for answering!

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