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Inspiring
January 31, 2019
Answered

Arabic, footnote references and harakats

  • January 31, 2019
  • 5 replies
  • 4462 views

Hi, all!

Faced with some mystic problem: I have footnote reference and some word after this reference. If, footnote reference more than one symbol (doesn't matter what it will be -- digit, another bracket, etc.), harakats is moving from their place. I really broke my head to try to figure out -- why they are doing it?

Here you can see not correct placing of harakats, with footnote reference + brackets:

Here the correct with footnote in one symbol:

Hope somebody will help me, cause I tried all that I know, and still not fix this.

Thank you.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer eduard dimasov

I posted a response on the Adobe bug-report portal. Here is a a video of the problem to support the case and perhaps have InDesign team understand the issue better.


Thank you, Zaid!

Btw, I received a letter with variant how to fix it: "I have fixed it by adjusting the default ‘diacritic positioning’ setting for only the affected harakah. Changing to ‘normal’ setting brings it closer to what it should be, then manually adjusting horizontal and vertical values to preference.

* Diacritic Positioning can be found in Window > Type and table > Diacritic Positioning

* an easy way to select the harakah is to place cursor directly after it, then press shift>directional arrow and it will highlight the last character (which is your affected harakah)

..it works! But "normal" doesn't work for me, so I dropped harakah by choosing position "loose".

Hope it will save somebody's time :-)

5 replies

Participant
June 4, 2024

If it is possible to put an Discretionary line break sign anywhere in the same line, it solves the problem formally

Participant
August 14, 2023

We have been seriously struggling with the underlying issue here. Other replies in this thread strongly suggest that this is a bug in InDesign (ME). I have added my comments to the bug reporting forum (Uservoice) - but there has not been a reply from Adobe there (https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/36731983-arabic-harakats-moving).

 

I'm adding my recent comment in the uservoice forum here, since I don't know if anyone will ever see the thread there (since the initial post is a few years ago).

 

As far as my team can tell -- this rendering problem with Arabic text happens whenever there is a U+FEFF (i.e. ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE [BOM, ZWNBSP]) present on the same line as text in which the diacritic rendering is corrupted.

 

It appear that using things like conditional text, or footnotes, or perhaps an anchored object etc. leaves a U+FEFF in the Story text. In the case of conditional text, when the condition is enabled (text made visible), then the diacritics render OK again. This appears (to us) to be because the U+FEFF is not longer present in the paragraph text stream (it is not present when the conditional text is visible).

 

*** This is really a serious bug. *** It makes typesetting Arabic properly nearly impossible with any features like conditional text or footnotes in use. We're currently needing to do massive workarounds in our workflows to continue our work.

 

Would someone from Adobe be able to investigate this with us? Please do let us know how we can connect.

Participant
April 2, 2019

Indesign Arabic Text Problem with diacritical marks for 3 years : (

I have had the same or a similar problem for around three years. I believe the problem is in some setting within Adobe Indesign. If you copy and paste the affected line into a new Indesign document the problem disappears, likewise if you delete the footnote the problem disappears.

Sample image without problem:

The little dash (which is a vowel marking known as a fatHah) appears above the letter known as laam in لا. However, when you insert a footnote, this moves the vowel marking (to the left) onto the adjacent letter (an `alif) as can be seen in the following image:

Hence, you can see from the above that if the footnote is present, the problem is present.

Now if I copy and paste this line into a new indesign document, the problem disappears, i.e. the footnote is there and the vowel marking is in the correct place as can be seen in the following image:

Now you might say if you have found a work around, then what is the problem. The answer is that the problem is in all of my indesign documents that I imported from Microsoft Word and it would mean that for every document, I now need to copy and paste into a new indesign document. Any help or advice on fixing this issue would be much appreciated.

P.s. the problem does not exist in MS Word...

Inspiring
April 23, 2019

Hi!

Do you have footnote references on the same line where you face with this problem? If yes, tell us. And try to remove footnote reference, then check again. You can create new document and place there only this word. I suppose that you'll find that everything in the right place.

amaarora
Inspiring
February 20, 2019

Hi,

Please share a sample document with me to reproduce the issue.

It is difficult for me (a roman user) to create this document. Share the file at [email removed]

-Aman

[ email address removed by moderator, please use PM --> https://forums.adobe.com/docs/DOC-3731 ]

Zaid Al Hilali
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 20, 2019

Hi Aman, Files sent to you by email.

Inspiring
February 20, 2019

Thanks for fast reply! If you can, pls, add me to converstation.

Inspiring
February 2, 2019

Small update, maybe helpful to understand..

As I see, footnote reference not moving harakats, but swaps them.

Zaid Al Hilali
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 3, 2019

Hi Eduard, Apparently it is a bug, I just tried it and laughed how diacritics (harakat) swaps their position… funny.

Please report this to Adobe on the appropriate portal here.

Inspiring
February 3, 2019

Sad news.

Thanks for reply!