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Biblical Cantillation Symbols (trope) in InDesign

New Here ,
Jun 08, 2021 Jun 08, 2021

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Does anyone have advice for pasting Hebrew Biblical text with cantillation marks into InDesign? We have the Middle Eastern version, and all of the regular Hebrew works beautifully, but the font doesn't seem to recognize cantillation symbols. Changing the font has only been a kerning disaster. Thanks very much!

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Community Expert ,
Jun 08, 2021 Jun 08, 2021

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"Changing the font has only been a kerning disaster."

 

Why? Can you show some sample screenshots?

Text frame selected, invisible characters showing and also the Story Editor Window.

 

Thanks,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

 

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Community Expert ,
Jun 08, 2021 Jun 08, 2021

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I'm curious about what font you are using, as well as asking all of Uwe's questions.

 

(Also, I'd like to place a small side bet on it being something from the LaserHebrew family from Linguist's Software.)

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People's Champ ,
Jun 08, 2021 Jun 08, 2021

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There are not so many fonts that support cantillation symbols properly, if at all.

The one free one that comes to mind is https://www.sbl-site.org/educational/biblicalfonts_sblhebrew.aspx

When you use that, does copy-pasting work?

Ariel

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New Here ,
Nov 28, 2021 Nov 28, 2021

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I have fonts that use cantilation marks, and have been trying to make it work, but when there is more than one mark per character, Indesign just doesn't know how to handle it. The marks move to weird places. Its not a font issue, because Microsoft Word knows how to handle it correctly with the same exact text and the same exact font. Any suggestions?

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Community Expert ,
Nov 28, 2021 Nov 28, 2021

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Font rendering in Word works rather differently than the way it works in InDesign. I'd suggest that you do what Uwe and Ariel have already suggested;

 

1) Can you post a screenshot of improperly rendered cantilation marks? Preferably with hidden characters visible and the Story Editor also visible, as Uwe suggested.

 

2) Likewise, have you tried it with the SBL Hebrew fonts posted by Ariel? 

 

I also wonder if you'd tried it with both the Paragraph Composer and the World-Ready Composer. 

 

 

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New Here ,
Nov 29, 2021 Nov 29, 2021

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I've been using world ready composer.

I tried the SBL font.

word processes it differently, and therefore what? Word seems to get it right.

I actually figured out how to manually adjust them but that's a huge project for a book, to change each specific one. The program should really display them correctly.

What else do you suggest?

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Community Expert ,
Nov 29, 2021 Nov 29, 2021

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> I actually figured out how to manually adjust them but that's a huge project for a book,

 

Is this something that can be controlled by a character style (Kerning or tracking, perhaps)? If it is you very likely could create a GREP style as part of your paragraph styles to do this automatically.

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New Here ,
Nov 29, 2021 Nov 29, 2021

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Kerning does not effect these marks. It has to be through diacritical positioning.
No way to do it automatically or not one by one as I see it.

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Community Expert ,
Nov 29, 2021 Nov 29, 2021

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word processes it differently, and therefore what? Word seems to get it right.

I actually figured out how to manually adjust them but that's a huge project for a book, to change each specific one. The program should really display them correctly.

 

The way that Word and InDesign handle advanced OpenType features is very, very different. If there's a bug in the way InDesign handles mark-to-mark positioning, it's worth reporting. In my experience, it's usually not an InDesign bug, but an artifact of how font designers cater to the idiosynracies of Microsoft's OT rendering. It doesn't look like that is the case here, though. If you care to post a small INDD here, with maybe a sample sentence of Hebrew rendering incorrectly, with (even better!) the same sample sentence rendering correctly in a screenshot in Word, then I'd be happy to go post it over at indesign.uservoice.com, which is where bug reports for InDesign are posted. It seems that someone has already tried that, but without documentation, and without some additional people whacking that "Vote" button, this particular issue isn't likely to see any developer attention. 

 

(Of course, if you do that it'll give us a chance to play with your sample to see if there isn't some tweak that would get them to render correctly before submitting a bug report, but I'm not too confident that this will happen here. Peter's right, though; if you have a manual fix, it could be generalized by someone here, likely with a GREP style or three, in a way that would get you to a published book without a manual slog, long before the bug was fixed at Adobe.)

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New Here ,
Nov 29, 2021 Nov 29, 2021

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Here is an indesign file and a word file.

Please also find the fonts attached.

You'll notice the Indesign file, all the fonts have overlapping diacritics.

In the Word doc, all the fonts are laid out perfectly.

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New Here ,
Nov 29, 2021 Nov 29, 2021

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I actually just noticed that Word has some issues with certain ones too. But overall, its much better.

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Community Expert ,
Nov 29, 2021 Nov 29, 2021

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Thanks for posting these; I'll examine them and turn 'em into a thread over at uservoice tomorrow morning. 

 

I'm not surprised that Word is better, nor am I surprised that it isn't perfect. OpenType font rendering varies from platform to platform, especially when you get to more advanced methods. When addressing complex script layout, it's not like we can necessarily expect the same OT font to behave the same in every operating system and in every app. Unicode, it ain't. I'm going to take a shot in the dark and guess that these fonts work perfectly... in Nisus Writer Pro. 😉

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New Here ,
Nov 29, 2021 Nov 29, 2021

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Thanks! I would love to see the update and where you post it!

 

hopefully it yields something.

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Community Expert ,
Nov 30, 2021 Nov 30, 2021

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Have you tried Window -> Type -> Diacritic Adjustment? Selecting "OpenType (adjustment from base character)" looks like it mimics the positioning of diacritics in Word almost perfectly. What I've done is this: I've made & attached  an InDesign file with three layers. One layer is your live text (colored red), another layer is your text with OT diacritic adjustment turned on (green), and the third is a PDF I made from Word (black). By turning layer visibility on and off, I can clearly see where diacritics are not displaying correctly (or, in fact, not displaying at all). 

 

Can you take a look at this and maybe identify which fonts, if any, are actually rendering correctly in ID? (I will also go and install the latest version, so that we can see if this was induced in the most recent update to 17.0.)

 

 

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Community Beginner ,
Jul 11, 2023 Jul 11, 2023

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Any luck? I still can't figure it out. 

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Community Expert ,
Jul 11, 2023 Jul 11, 2023

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I don't really handle much Hebrew, and never anything pentateuchal, so I don't know what the current state of cantillation mark affairs is, in InDesign, or if anything has changed in the last eighteen months. The poster who started this thread kinda ghosted on me; I was working on a bug report, and needed someone to compare my files to see if any of the fonts were being rendered correctly. I built a demo file for kennyr and said "Hey, here's a setting that I think perfectly mimics Word behavior. Can you look at it and tell me if any of these fonts are rendering correctly?" In return... crickets. Without that kind of information, there's not much I can do, you know? 

 

My limited exposure to Hebrew typesetting inclines me to believe that the setting  "OpenType (adjustment from base character)" in the Diacritic Adjustment panel is what fixes this particular issue in this particular font. Have you tried that? Did it work?

 

My fairly broad experience of other complex writing systems leaves me with the impression that this functionality will vary from font to font. 

 

I stand by my guess that these fonts work perfectly in Nisus Writer Pro. 

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Community Beginner ,
Jul 12, 2023 Jul 12, 2023

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The changes you made with the green color on pages 7 and 8 appear to be effective. I'm unsure how to replicate that myself, though. It appears to only work with certain fonts, and my understanding is that I would need to make specific adjustments for those particular fonts.

I'm sorry, but I didn't quite understand your instructions. I'm not very experienced with this, and I couldn't locate the "Diacritic Adjustment" you mentioned.

It seems like all of this is just a workaround, and I haven't been able to find any Hebrew font with Cantillation that has this feature working properly in InDesign. It appears to be an issue with InDesign itself, and it's frustrating.

Also, I appreciate you, thanks man. 

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Community Expert ,
Jul 12, 2023 Jul 12, 2023

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1000x thanks for your feedback. You can find the Diacritcs Adjustment panel in Window -> Type -> Diacritic Adjustment. If you select some text with the Text tool and go to the Diacritics Adjustment panel, you have some control over how InDesign renders these marks with the dropdown.

 

Pages 7 and 8 of that file used the Taamey David and Taamey Frank fonts, which seems to indicate that they work for you on your system when OpenType adjustment is turned on. Each page of that file was devoted to comparing the layout of one font against the PDF of the Word file provided by Kennyr Bunchanumbers. 

 

The sad truth is that different fonts use different methods to achieve correct layout, and some tools support these methods better than other tools. Many font developers working in complex script languages will make fonts that work perfectly in MS Word, and they'll work around Word's idiocyncracies in complex-script rendering.  These allowances for the way that Word (and Windows generally) handle these methods mean that sometimes the font that works perfectly in Word doesn't work perfectly in InDesign. 

 

So the InDesign developers have given us a tool - not a workaround, a tool - to adjust the way that these diacritic marks are displayed, so that InDesign can use a broad array of OpenType fonts. You can use this tool by placing some Hebrew text, and then selecting that text with the Text tool, and then turning on OpenType adjustment, like so:

justodit.gif

 

Or you can do it manually.

 

none.gif

 

Here, I'm using the keyboard and the Shift key to select one glyph at a time. The first glyph is the vaav and the second glyph is the shva, and so I can manipulate the horizontal position of the shva by hand, if I want, if OpenType adjustment is off. Similarly, by using the keyboard I can select just the kamatz or just the munah, and position them manually.

 

That would take forever, though, so I'd rather trust the OpenType positioning. This is necessary because this font uses the OpenType mark-to-mark positioning method, meaning that the position of the munah is being set by this font relative to the position of the kamatz, so if your OpenType settings are incorrect, you'll get incorrect layout.

 

So, I understand your frustration, but this level of frustration is totally normal when computing using complex-script languages. They're hard! It's not like Latin script languages where you drop in some German text and expect it to Just Work. Also, it's not MS Word-level easy, which I am okay with because no matter how easily I can use a given font in Word, I would far rather work in an app that doesn't change the entire layout when I reposition a text frame, or whatever. Doing Toranic layout (or Quranic layout) requires better tools and more skill than just laying out Hebrew or Arabic. Not to mention Persian, Urdu, Lao, Khmer, Tibetan... But I don't really do anything in my day-to-day work with vowel marks in Hebrew. If historical Hebrew, or Torah layout, were to be my day job, I might feel differently. 

 

Feel free to post more questions here, I'll do my best to answer 'em. 

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Community Beginner ,
Jul 16, 2023 Jul 16, 2023

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I think I'll use David as a base to edit my fonts that I'd like to use.

 

Since after the diacritic adjustments it seems to work. I tried using Kenny's guy's work and it sadly didn't work. He's a nice dude, ganna speak to him more. I wish I understood the actual issue so I could fix it when making or editing fonts. I have Soo much work to do on my project didn't think I'd need to put this much work into my fonts. 

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New Here ,
Jul 12, 2023 Jul 12, 2023

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I'm sorry for the crickets! I just saw this response now, I guesss it slipped past me when you had originally answered.

 

I have since purchased a full on Hebrew font with diacritics and created a book.

The setting that I have been using that has worked most for me, "OpenType (Adjustment from Base of Character)"

but I just tested that with new text and one of the free fonts that I had originally been using and it seems to be giving me the same issue.

 

The answer seems to be to buy a legit font from a font designer who knows what he's doing.

The guy I bought the font from offered the following: "If you have any font you like but it doesn't work right or it's not unicode, or it's still postscript type 1. I can reformat and reprogram any font you want."

 

So that may be a solution, though I don't know how much he would charge. He seemed like a nice reasonable guy.

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New Here ,
Jul 12, 2023 Jul 12, 2023

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Additionally, before I purchased the font, I actually did do it manually for each letter, and then I used "Find and Replace" to replace a combination of a letter with a specific nikud in the rest of the document. It was an absolutely insane way to do it.

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New Here ,
Jul 12, 2023 Jul 12, 2023

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Happy to talk further offline or to connect anyone with the designer I bought the font from.

Not sure if DMs exist in this forum or if there's a way to share contact information, but I may not see posts here.

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Community Expert ,
Jul 12, 2023 Jul 12, 2023

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The answer seems to be to buy a legit font from a font designer who knows what he's doing.

The guy I bought the font from offered the following: "If you have any font you like but it doesn't work right or it's not unicode, or it's still postscript type 1. I can reformat and reprogram any font you want."

 

Hey Kenny, thanks for coming back! It's true, the quality of the font matters - in this case it's not the artistic quality of the curves chosen by the designer, but the OT methods used and all of that under-the-hood stuff that makes a font work well. It's also of extreme utility to have the Bespoke Complex Script Font Guy on your side 😉 

 

I have had to do it the insane way you describe (make a well-composed stack of glyphs, automate copying that one well-composed stack and replace all the bad stacks throughout the doc) enough times that I've automated the process. It's always easier in the long run to just get a well-built font, though. That means that, unless you're not billing for your time, it's usually cheaper in the long run to fork out $ for a well-built font, assuming that such a thing exists in your target language. (Here's where I'd ordinarily go on at great length about minority Burmese languages, but instead I'll censor myself and wish you good luck!)

 

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Community Expert ,
Jul 12, 2023 Jul 12, 2023

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Hi together,

maybe this InDesign script by Roland Dreger can help?

 

OpenType features Dialog

Roland says: The idea behind this script is to test the OpenType features of an installed font in InDesign - without flyouts, dropdowns, and the like.

https://github.com/RolandDreger/open-type-features#readme

 

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

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