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Auto Numbering Pages, Figures and Bullet Lists in Burmese/Myanmar Language

Community Beginner ,
Jul 17, 2022 Jul 17, 2022

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Hi I am very new to InDesign. I would like to know whether it is possible to have auto numbering in Burmese or not. If it's not possible out of the box, what are the options I have to achieve auto numbering? In LaTex, I can achieve auto numbering in Burmese using some macros. Can I do similarly in InDesign using some sort of scripting?

Thanks!

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How to , Scripting

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correct answers 2 Correct answers

Community Expert , Jul 18, 2022 Jul 18, 2022

Dig deeper. You can choose the numbrs you want, depending on the language version you have installed. It is possible to install several languageversions on top of each other.

In my example I have installed on top of each other German, Hebrew and Arabic. If you miss a numeric form, you have not installed any language which needs that number.

Numbers.png

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Community Expert , Jul 20, 2022 Jul 20, 2022

Totally relevant, here. What you propose to do is one of the things I did, ten or fifteen years ago. It works, and is often easier than manually lettering or numbering such lists. (I am still combing through the Wayback Machine looking for off-site references to posts about the discussions we had back then, about how to add kinds of complex-script auto-numbering and auto-lettering lists to InDesign without using edited fonts.) 

 

Speaking as someone who has had to work with these kinds of homebr

...

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Community Expert ,
Jul 17, 2022 Jul 17, 2022

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I don't know your language. But numbering should always be possible and also be done via paragraph styles.

In the paragraph style definition you find a section Bullets and Numbers. When you go there you have several options and you can choose a character style for the numbering. I think you will find there everything you need for your language.

 

Numbering and bullets can also be set on the left side or on the right side pf any paragraph, but it is a little bit tricky to do it on the oposite side of the normal position.

 

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Community Beginner ,
Jul 18, 2022 Jul 18, 2022

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Hello Mr. @Willi Adelberger , I do get auto numbering in InDesign. But they are displayed as 1, 2, 3, ... etc.,. In fact 1, 2, 3, ... should map to ၁, ၂, ၃, ... in our language. What I'd like to know is if it is possible achieve auto numbers which map to our language. I've attached a screenshot for your reference. 

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Community Expert ,
Jul 18, 2022 Jul 18, 2022

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Dig deeper. You can choose the numbrs you want, depending on the language version you have installed. It is possible to install several languageversions on top of each other.

In my example I have installed on top of each other German, Hebrew and Arabic. If you miss a numeric form, you have not installed any language which needs that number.

Numbers.png

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Community Beginner ,
Jul 18, 2022 Jul 18, 2022

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Okay... thanks. According to your screenshot, I believe it must be possible. I'll try to figure out how it can be done for Burmese.

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Community Expert ,
Jul 18, 2022 Jul 18, 2022

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I've not yet seen any easy way to add numbering in Burmese to that dropdown list. However, I learned from another poster here that the Unicode font "Pyingaungsu Numbers" has only proper Burmese numerals and no Arabic numerals, so you can do numbered lists and page numbers and such in Burmese numerals, if you set up the paragraph and character styles as outlined by Willi. 

 

You can find the font in a few different places, but if you look here it's partway down the page. You'd want the 2.5.3 version, not the 1.8.3 version. 

 

There are other language versions of InDesign that have different selections (i.e. I seem to recall some outliers like Taiwanese banking numerals in the Chinese version of InDesign) but, so far as I know, using a font with Burmese numerals only is the only way to do numbered lists or page numbers in Burmese.

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Community Beginner ,
Jul 18, 2022 Jul 18, 2022

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@Joel Cherney Thanks for the info. You are right, I can't add Burmese to that dropdown list either. I've also seen how it can be done using Pyidaungsu Numbers. But I am a bit reluctant to use that method because I'd like to use fonts other than Pyidaungsu. 

 

Another possible way is described here for Khmer language. I tried changing the script a little for Burmese, and it seems to work, at least for my testing.

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Community Expert ,
Jul 19, 2022 Jul 19, 2022

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Aha! Thank you for posting this. I'd tried to do this myself, about ten years ago, and my scripting skills weren't up to the task back then. Using that script creates a new paragraph style with the necessary settings for Khmer numerals, and it seems like it ought to work for any language for which InDesign supports the digits.

 

So, I whomped up my own Burmese numeral paragraph style script, which I've added here for the people who will find this thread later. Yours looks something like this, I suppose? Excepting, perhaps, the choice of font?

/*
	Add Paragraph style with Burmese numbering
	Based on "Khmer Page Numbering.jsx"	version: 1.1 by Thomas Silkjær
	
*/

var my_document = app.documents.item(0).paragraphStyles.add({
	name:"Myanmar",
	characterDirection:CharacterDirectionOptions.LEFT_TO_RIGHT_DIRECTION,
	composer:"Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer",
	digitsType:DigitsTypeOptions.BURMESE_DIGITS,
	paragraphDirection:ParagraphDirectionOptions.LEFT_TO_RIGHT_DIRECTION,
	appliedFont:"Paduak"
});

 

this all reminds me of a conversation that I took part in, ten years ago, where John Hawkinson put me onto the idea of crea... files to have generic preferences set up to access numbering styles and such that aren't available in the UI of one's InDesign install. 

 

This looks like a lot more work than the create-a-new-Khmer-paragraph-style method, but could be really useful for those who create InDesign documents regularly in languages not supported by the default UI. Lots of defaults can be specified in the .iddx files - the generic name for a Table of Contents, indexing styles, and so on. I know what I'm working on the next time I have a spare afternoon!

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Community Beginner ,
Jul 19, 2022 Jul 19, 2022

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To be exact, I used mm_My instead of Myanmar like below:

name:"mm_My"

 But I guess yours will work too. 

By the way, I am quite new to InDesign and it's interesting to know *.iddx files are there as an option as well though I don't know much about them yet. 

 

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Community Expert ,
Jul 19, 2022 Jul 19, 2022

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That makes sense; I was basing the language identifier "Myanmar" it off of the language identifier "Khmer" in the Thomas Silkjær script you posted, and I didn't stop to test it or to look up exactly which kind of language declaration would be needed there. However, I just did, and it seems to work equally well with either of the language declarations we used.

 

"iddx" files are one of those under-the-hood filetypes that saw some experimentation & posts describing them, some years back. I haven't seen anyone playing around with them recently, but as I do more workflow development and less actual formatting work, I find myself looking for old posts that have vanished when Adobe switched forums software, or when blogs were taken offline, and so on. A lot has changed in the last ten years, in terms of language-industry workflows, and so we perform fewer hacky workarounds in InDesign to do multilingual work, and do more of our work inside mature translation management systems that simply consume IDML and export... well, whatever we want.

 

 

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Community Beginner ,
Jul 19, 2022 Jul 19, 2022

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@Joel Cherney, may I ask a little less revelant question from the currently topic? I was wondering what your take would be if I do something like in this post . I know it's just a stopgap solution and, of course, not clean. But that might be the last resort in some cases. For example, I would also need to map A, B, C, . . . to က, ခ, ဂ, . . . as well. I am not quite sure yet I can do that.

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Community Beginner ,
Jul 19, 2022 Jul 19, 2022

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sorry, should be ". . . less relevant question from the current topic? "

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Community Expert ,
Jul 20, 2022 Jul 20, 2022

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Totally relevant, here. What you propose to do is one of the things I did, ten or fifteen years ago. It works, and is often easier than manually lettering or numbering such lists. (I am still combing through the Wayback Machine looking for off-site references to posts about the discussions we had back then, about how to add kinds of complex-script auto-numbering and auto-lettering lists to InDesign without using edited fonts.) 

 

Speaking as someone who has had to work with these kinds of homebrew or hacked fonts at great length, I would implore you to rename your font in all the relevant font fields in FontLab. I've spent way too much time in this life fighting with multiple versions of Zawgyi-One or KNU that have identical names but different glyph complements.  

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Community Beginner ,
Jul 20, 2022 Jul 20, 2022

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Thanks for the valuable information. If someone has done this before and if it worked, I might as well do the same when necessary. Noted that I should rename the font fields.

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