Challenges with Cross-Referencing Auto-Numbered Captions in InDesign for Slovak & Czech Translations

[D.Mitchell]

Colleagues, 

=Bottom Line=

Our EN source has “Figure 1” and “Table 1” (etc.) as auto-numbered paragraph captions. In both SK and CZ the translation of “Figure” or “Table” is different in the caption than it is in the running text. 

Example

Caption: Obrázok 1.1

Running Text: obrázku 1.1

I cannot find any way of having a cross-reference pull in the auto-number from the caption paragraph style and either: 1) Change the translation as shown, or 2) pull in just the number and replace the text as show in the cross-reference format. 

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Paragraph Style–Numbering: Obrázok ^1.^5^t

Cross-Reference: <paraNum />

Figure Caption: Obrázok 1.1   [redacted]

Running text: [Redacted] obrázku 1.1.

Since InDesign doesn’t seem to have the FrameMaker-like “paraNumOnly” cross-reference building block, it pulls in the word + number. 

InDesign also doesn’t seem to allow any auto-numbering of the caption style unless it starts the paragraph, thereby disallowing me to separate the text from the numbering: [Figure ][autonumber #.#][TAB][Caption Text]

Therefore this is a very perplexing problem: The text must be changed in the running text to conform to the translations, but I cannot find a way within the InDesign app to make this happen!

I’m hoping that someone in the translation industry has run into this issue before, and has a solution. Thanks in advance for any help, insight and/or guidance you can provide in resolving this issue. 

All my best,

D.Mitchell

Feature Request: To the INDD Devs please add ‘paraNumOnly’ to resolve this issue. While you’re there feel free to review the FrameMaker building blocks to add even more functionality to INDD. 

<Title renamed by MOD>

[Joel Cherney]

I'm sure I've run into your issue before, but I can't quite tell exactly which localization hitch you're caught up on. Is it the fact that Czech and Slovak have case endings? I always handle this by removing all automatically inserted text in the caption & cross-reference definitions. This particular part of your post makes no sense to me:

Since InDesign doesn’t seem to have the FrameMaker-like “paraNumOnly” cross-reference building block, it pulls in the word + number

What's "it" here, in the phrase "it pulls in the word + number"? The cross-reference? It looks like you've built your xref correctly with just "<paraNum >", which would mean that you've built your paragraph numbering incorrectly. You can't include "Obrázok" in the Bullets & Numbering section of the paragraph style; since its case is going to change, it needs to be live text. So you'd need to go through every single instance of numbered figures and tables or whatever and manually insert "Obrázok" into captions instead of relying on inserting it in the auto-numbering part of the paragraph style.  

The last time I worked on a project like this one, I wound up editing the IDML directly, as it was faster to find/replace there to remove the terms in the Russian & Ukrainian captions that had incorrect case. The Ukrainian guy wrote a little JS to automatically correct the case - in your shoes, it'd be as if your paragraph numbering just had "Obráz" and the script would parse the whole document and add -ok or -ku accordingly - but it put the wrong case ending in about 5% of the time (surely someone out there can pull it off, but my personal experience is that "don't try to parse Slavic languages with regex" should be up there with "don't try to parse XML with regex"). I had to rip it all out and do it all manually anyways.  

At any rate, if I've not understood part of your question, I encourage you to reply, perhaps with some screenshots so we don't have to guess at what's going on at your end. Posting an experimental INDD is also often helpful; even if you can't post any of your client's content, it might be beneficial if you were to gin up a quick simulation of your issue with some generic text. 

Lastly, this community is a great place to chat about ideas, but feature requests proper belong over at indesign.uservoice.com. I personally wouldn't mind seeing some Frame functionality ported over to ID, but I'm not holding my breath. 

[D.Mitchell]

Hi Joel!

Thank you for your reply. 

Yes, the issue at hand is the case ending change between the auto-number text and the cross-reference in the body copy. We had thought of removing the text from the auto-number, but again InDesign doesn't allow the user to have an auto-numbered paragraph with manually inserted text before the auto-number.

Hence my example: [Figure ][autonumber #.#][TAB][Caption Text] 

We don't seem to be able to setup the figure caption text as above, with the green text being manually placed, yet with the red autonumber text being in the middle of the paragraph. Yet you stated, “So you'd need to go through every single instance of numbered figures and tables or whatever and manually insert "Obrázok" into captions instead of relying on inserting it in the auto-numbering part of the paragraph style,” and I honestly have no idea how to do that. How do you go about inserting “Figure ” at the beginning of an auto-numbered paragraph? Placing the cursor is this block of text starts after the auto-numbering.

If we could do that then this issue should be resolved, as we can then change the case endings as needed within the cross-reference and just pull in the auto-numbering with "paraNum" as usual!

Also, your other suggestions seem to indicate a sort of hack to the file, either modifying the IDML, or modifying the INDD, but either way it would seem that any further updates to the file, and hence updating the cross-refereces, would remove these, yeah? 

All my best,

D.Mitchell

[Joel Cherney · Accepted solution]

Also, your other suggestions seem to indicate a sort of hack to the file, either modifying the IDML, or modifying the INDD, but either way it would seem that any further updates to the file, and hence updating the cross-refereces, would remove these, yeah? 

Yep! I guess that wouldn't work for you, in that case.  

Some pictures or sample files would be very helpful, here. I'll keep guessing, though. 

I'm imagining that you're working with a client's file that maybe didn't see a lot of pre-translation file engineering before the PM dropped the IDML into your TM tool, right? If I were to be given the task of pre-translation file engineering and I saw that there were a bunch of figures with capital-C Captions, be they Live or Static, or using text variables, or paragraph numbering, or something else that is not directly editable, I would say "Hey Client, what are the target languages for this project?" And if the answer included any language that used case termination on nouns (or any other fancy syntax that doesn't map well onto English grammatical structure), and that perhaps had auto-generated xrefs in the body text, I would 

immediately

replace everything with editable live text. Only then would I say "Hey,  Client, I had to blow out all of your auto-genned captions due to the complex grammar of your target language(s). Do you expect to... y'know... be able to add or remove figures and have numbering auto-update?" If there answer was something along the lines of "well, yeah, Joel, and the metadata content as well, that's why were are using Live Captions" then I would go and rebuild all of those captions using number-only xrefs to do the auto-numbering. That way, their numbering can still auto-update, using the only real body-text-friendly auto-numbering tool that InDesign has. Then I might leave verbose, detailed notes in the pasteboard so that when the original designer got their file back, they'd have some explanation as to why their carefully managed document interactivity has been removed and replaced with a bunch of manual work.

These tools in InDesign weren't designed with Interesting Languages in mind, I think. There are lots of advanced features in InDesign that work just fine in English, Spanish, French, and German (maybe Japanese if you're lucky). Other languages, not so much. The vast majority of my work is in these Other, Interesting Languages, which is why I know so little about how these tools are meant to work. If I come across them, I only know that I need to remove them entirely and replace them with text my translators would see from their view inside the TM tool, or my 30-language job will fail on e.g. a table header in 20 out of 30 languages. I learned this mostly by being in your shoes, at what I thought was the end of the project, and finding out that I had hours of fiddly manual work yet to do. Apologies if this feels disrespectful or flip, but be thankful it's only two languages, not twenty! 

The foregoing is true of text-variable-based auto-generated text as well, such as Running Headers. If it needs to be in body text in a language with case termination (or three or four other syntactically complex circumstances), there's no way to use InDesign's text variables. Translators don't see that text in their view inside the TM tool. It has to be done manually. 

How do you go about inserting “Figure ” at the beginning of an auto-numbered paragraph? 

Many years ago, I used Jongware's IndyFont to make a single-character font with the entire word "Table " in.... Burmese, maybe? Lao? as a single glyph, so I could use it as a bullet character, in a similar workflow. It was a dirty hack, most likely best left in the dustbin of history. But it did make figure-numbering automation possible. 

Even though it's been years since I did any serious work in Framemaker, I still encounter these situations on a regular basis, where I long for a feature that we've had in Frame for decades. InDesign's long-document features are often weak, in comparison with Frame. If you're coming from a Frame background, get ready to rebuild a bunch of stuff manually, and feel like you're wasting your time. For what it's worth, going the other direction has much the same effect: "Oh hi, here's another graphical element that'd take me ten seconds to edit/recreate if I were working in InDesign, but I'm working in Frame, so I guess it's time to reopen Illustrator for the upteenth time this hour!" 

Lastly, I do encourage you (at some point in the future, when you have the leisure to do so) to go post this at the Uservoice. If you scan the suggestions there, I assure you that you will find a bunch of other feature requests for things that are very familiar to you from Framemaker, and if you upvote those features then they will have very slightly improved chances of being seen, and perhaps implemented, by the development team. 

[D.Mitchell]

I've marked this as the Correct Answer. 

It's what I expected: Due to the limitations of InDesign (all versions as of this post) you cannot have text as part of an auto-numbered paragraph style, that needs to then be changed in the cross-reference, because InDesign doesn't have a Paragraph Number Only building block. You must convert all such auto-numbers to static text for translation. 

Thank you for your time and expertise Joel. Very much appreciated! 

[D.Mitchell]

Addendum: Assuming that your translations of “Figure 1” etc., don't change you can leave the auto-numbering in place, and at the beginning of each figure caption place a Text Anchor to link to. This will maintain your cross-reference hyperlinks, and auto-numbering of the captions, but the Text Anchor cannot be auto-updated if the numbering changes. 

Place the cursor at the beginning of the caption, and from the “Cross-References” panel’s fly-out menu select “New Hyperlink Destination...”. Change to “Type: Text Anchor” and in the “Name:” field paste in your static text. Then double-click your cross-reference and change to “Link To: Text Anchor” and from the “Text Anchor” menu select the correct anchor with the correct spelling. 

Depending on language you may need to add more than one text anchor to that location if you require multiple case endings within the body copy. Since InDesign doesn’t show you Text Anchors here’s a script that will: https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/text_anchors.html (that I’ve not yet tested to use with caution).