Arabic - incorrect positioning of nested parentheses

[kevinbrianbird]

I have a word document that contains Latin and Arabic text in the same paragraph. In one paragraph there are nest parenthesis.

When importing this paragraph into InDesign 2022 (ME version), the order of the parenthesis changes.

The font I am using is Adobe Arabic. I consider the language, text direction and Composer settings in the InDesign document to be correct, but no matter what I do, I seem unable to replicate the appearance in the Word document.

As I missing something obvious? Any help would be gretly appreciated.

--

Kevin 

[Joel Cherney]

No, I think that the thing you're missing is decidedly non-obvious. The text shaping engine in InDesign handles directionality of such glyphs (parentheses, brackets, etc.) rather differently than does the Microsoft shaping engine. Even if you have all of the Arabic glyphs, spaces, and parentheses marked with the Arabic language in the dropdown in the Character panel, you may need to go and mark some parentheses and spaces with the Character Direction -> Right to Left. I can't be sure without actually analyzing live text, but I'd guess that the logical order of the text (the order in which the text was keyed) won't render as you would expect unless you mark the space immediately after 1987 as Right-to-Left. Doesn't matter if it's in an RTL paragraph and marked as Arabic; it's a space that has a 7 on one side and a parenthesis on the other, and so the space and parenthesis are going to render as LTR. If that 7 was marked as Arabic language, and the Digits were set to Hindi (or to "Default," at least when the language is set to Arabic), then it might behave differently. Hard to say without actually trying it. 

Whenever you're dealing with nested parenthesis with Latin-script content in an Arabic RTL paragraph, you will occasionally need to force directionality by going to the flyout menu in the Character panel and force the Character direction to Right-to-Left instead of Default. If you post a live text example, I can make a quick GIF animation to show how this works.

(I don't think it's exactly intuitive, but I personally find it easier to work with than Word's text handling, where I often just give up and force my desired text directionality with Unicode control characters.)

[kevinbrianbird]

Hi Joel

Thanks for the feedback - it's appreciated.

Yes, to get the correct order, I had to manually change the directionality of one of the parentheses.

I thought InDesign was having an issue with the closing parenthesis that has a '1' to the left and Teh Marbuta to the right, with no separating space, because when I modified the Word doc to include a space, the text formatted as expected.  

I've tried using GREP to find the above string, so I could add a space before the Arabic character, but it seems the 'text shaping engine' (not heard that phrase before) has already re-arranged the characters, so my attempts at matching failed!

I'll do some further head-scratching over the weekend.

--

Kevin

[Joel Cherney]

it seems the 'text shaping engine' (not heard that phrase before) has already re-arranged the characters, so my attempts at matching failed!

Well, your text exists as a string of characters, and something has to render them, right? Some bit of code has to interpret the characters and lay them out according to a set of rules. All that I'm trying to point out there is that the bit of code that does so in InDesign was written by Adobe, and has a different set of assumptions about What is Meant to Happen than the bit of MS code that is doing the same job in Word. Accordingly, they won't necessarily behave the same way all the time. 

However, it doesn't "re-arrange" the characters. It changes the order in which the characters are displayed, but it doesn't change their logical order. The same regex that captures the first example below will capture the second one, will also capture the second. (In your shoes, I'd just look for Any Open Paren Preceded by Any Not-Space to fix this particular issue.)

[Zaid Al Hilali]

This is a typical (bi-directional/bi-lingual) issue. I always encourage users to reduce the differences in these bi/bi scenarios by using the same platform as much as possible ie. Mac/Windows, and try to use the same vendor software such as InCopy-to-InDesign for instance.

I will leave you with Joel, his suggestions are the best always 🙂

[kevinbrianbird]

Thank you both for your feedback and comments. It's given me enough information to find a way forward.