Changing text direction in ID 20.5

[sa63481182]

Where is the "Character Direction" option in InDesign 20.5?

I need to do it on the Character level because it is an English document with a word in another language with a definition. I can't use the Paragragh options. The instructions in Help say it's on the Character panel when you open the Options. But there is no "Character Direction" option in the list.

I tried asking the "Bot" which is horrible. I put the same question I wrote here, and it then asked me for more clarity on which Adobe product I was asking about. Then I did a search here on the help boards and the results returned "0".

Can anyone help with this??

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Are you working with the Middle Eastern version?

[sa63481182]

Thank you for helping. No, I'm working in the English version. All of the work is in English except for the one or two words that have to be in another language.

[email signature deleted by moderator]

[Willi Adelberger]

You need to install a ME version. You can do it upon your primary language installation. Needed plugins are added. 
Go to the CC Desktop Application. Go to settings. Change the the application language of the installed programs. Install InDesign again. Then change back to your primary language. 
Now you can run InDesign with additional functionality. 
You can change the direction on document, frame, paragraph and character level and their styles. 

[Willi Adelberger]

Additional to the extended functionality are fonts installed. I have installed English with Hebrew installed. Now I get also needed fonts for biblical commentaries and theological travel guides for Israel. (I typeser for several evangelical German publishers as long as I can as my personal power is limited due to cancer.)

[sa63481182]

Gosh, thank you so much for helping. I will be praying for you!!

I'm trying what you suggest now. I opened Settings, I changed the "Default install language" to the "English Hebrew".  Screen shot below. I then reinstalled InDesign. I opened the document and went to the footnote with the Hebrew. I selected the text, then went to the Character panel, selected the options, and selected the "Character direction, to Right to Left. But the Hebrew text didn't change.

Did I make an error in what I did above? Or is there something else I need to do?

[Willi Adelberger]

In all paragraph styles with Hebrew text or even particles you have  to go to Justification/Fine Tuning and change the composer to one of the Adobe World Composer. This will enable a different text direction.

Thanks for your prayers.

[sa63481182]

Hi, Dave; I'm checking to see if you have any help on this issue. I did what Willi said to do, but now, even though I have the option of selecting "Change Text Direction", the Hebrew text doesn't change! I can't figure out what to try next. I even did a search for an ME version, but I can't find that, maybe what's available is different? It installed the most current version of ID. What Willi said was to change the language setting for the apps, which I did, the only options was "English Hebrew". So, some of the options are different than what he had originally suggested, so I've tried all of that. But, the bottom line is that the Hebrew text is still backwards. Suggestions? Corrections for me? Thank you.

 

[Joel Cherney]

but now, even though I have the option of selecting "Change Text Direction", the Hebrew text doesn't change! I can't figure out what to try next. 

Well, that sounds like it ought to have worked. There are a few things necessary for working in right-to-left languages that need to be set up correctly before everything works:

1) The paragraph composer has to be set to the World-Ready Paragraph Composer. (This seems weird to people today, but back when support for right-to-left languages was introduced in InDesign, they did it by adding a whole new paragraph composer instead of just making the default composer support right-to-left languages. It made sense in like 2002 when right-to-left typesetting was rather harder than it is today.) You can change this in a few different ways - the most meaningful are probably going to be in the Paragraph Style (it's in the Justification section of the style) or by going to Type -> Apply World-Ready Composers which will change the composer on every paragraph in the whole document.

2) The language of the text should be marked as Hebrew - if you have one Hebrew word in an English paragraph, this would be best done by making a character style, and applying it to your Hebrew word. 

3) In that character style, I'd suggest that you set the Language to Hebrew and the direction to Default instead of Right-to-Left. It's up to you, but sometimes there are characters that can be bidirectional (like parentheses, for example) and they behave better if they're marked as Default, so they can inherit the directionality of the surrounding characters instead of being forced into a particular direction.

If you go through that and your Hebrew still isn't behaving in a right-to-left fashion, I'd suggest that you post a small InDesign document - maybe with one English paragraph with one Hebrew word in it? - so we can examine your file and make sure there's not something weird going on. 

Lastly, the "ME edition" name isn't something that I think you will see in Adobe's help files or menus. It dates back to that early-2000s era I mentioned above, when Adobe's product had zero support for right-to-left languages, and a French company called Winsoft made the "Middle East/North Africa Edition" of InDesign. We called it "the ME edition" back then, and while the name stuck for many years after Adobe ended its relationship with Winsoft, I don't think that they're using that terminology anymore - it's just us old forums folks who call it that, these days.

[sa63481182]

Thank you, Joel, and everybody. It's still not working. I will give a description with screen shots.

I tried switching to the World-Ready Paragraph Composer. But that changes the direction of the entire paragraph. I also created a Character Style, named it Hebrew, set as Joel suggested. It had no effect when I tried to apply it. I'm shutting down tonight but will be back at it Thursday.

[Willi Adelberger]

Could it be thhat you changed the direction of the paragraph?

[Joel Cherney]

I honestly don't think that screenshots are hugely useful in troubleshooting an issue like yours. An actual INDD file - a single paragraph with a single footnote that contained text not following its correct direction - would make figuring out how it's set up extremely easy. Without that, there's a bunch of guesswork as to what might be causing your text to misbehave.(Willi has already taken a shot at it - was he correct?) 

So I've attached a file that has a functional English paragraph style with a functional Hebrew paragraph style:

• English paragraph style: World-Ready Composer, English language, Default direction
• Hebrew character style: Hebrew language, Default direction

That's really all it takes. We can't guess how your file is set up, but it's not like this. I suspect that you may have tried some local formatting - some text direction changes that are not captured in your paragraph or character style. You can check this by highlighting all of the text in a given paragraph and looking for the plus symbol next to the paragraph style name indicating an override. In the flyout menu of the Paragraph Styles panel, you can "Clear Overrides" which should remove any formatting not applied by the character or paragraph styles. 

[sa63481182 · Accepted solution]

Success!

The problem I was having in my document is in the Paragraph Style: Footnote. I have 2 instances of this problem on 2 different pages. I had already done everything that was suggested and couldn't find the problem after several days. When I loaded the document today, yet again, I applied the World-Ready Paragraph Composer to the 2nd instance of Hebrew and it displayed correctly! Why? I went back and checked the 1st instance—which was the instance I had been working on this whole time—it still had the same wrong behavior. So there had to be something different between the two and I started  comparing them to what Joel sent.

The 2nd instance where the WRPC worked perfectly, in the settings of the Paragraph Style: open the settings up with right click on Edit Footnote Text. On that first window, the top two drop down selection menus are: Based On and Next Style. The instance where it was working correctly, the first one, Based On, was set to No Paragraph Style, the same as the example Joel sent. The instance where it wasn't working was for some reason set to Basic Paragraph Style. Once I changed it to No Paragraph Style, it worked just fine! (screen shot attached in case another user needs it) I tested in another paragraph to be sure. I pasted the Hebrew, set the font to Adobe Hebrew, then applied the WRPC to the paragraph and it worked just fine.

A huge thank you to Willi, Dave and Joel!