Data merge for manual with special characters

[Urban2981539519v9]

Hi I already checked this https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/data-merge-with-special-characters-on-mac/td-p/1... but for a manual it does not work.

I work with many languages that uses special characters.

Is there a csv export that indesign allows which keeps this special characters?

Or is there an easy way to replace the characters in numbers for something indesign understands?

If it cannot be solved, is there a good alternative for Data merge? like a plugin?

 

 

[Peter Spier]

For characters that don't behave in data merge I generally use a substitute text string that will merge and then run find/change to replace that string with the correct character.

[Urban2981539519v9]

I could not do this to replace basically every character by hand for japanese or bulgarian.. But the trick is to import utf 16 txt file.

[Urban2981539519v9]

Solved it with chatgpt, I had to verify the csv with bbedit and then I could do a replace of the ; to a tab /t and save as a utf16 small endian .txt file.
This imports great.

[Joel Cherney]

Nooooooo

I mean, I'm glad that worked for you, but it's not a correct answer at all.  Likewise, the answer that you found in that other thread is incorrect in your case. Instead of editing incorrectly encoded translations by hand, in languages you cannot read, you should check the "import options" checkbox when selecting your Data Source, and then choose a Unicode encoding. 

[Urban2981539519v9]

Yes this is even better! it works, thanks!

[Urban2981539519v9]

Sorry it does not work.. I thought it did, but it just did not load the csv and kept the txt file which worked.

I removed the data source and tried importing the csv file with unicode, but I get the same issues.

Do you have an idea what goes wrong? The only thing that works for me is UTF16 little endian .txt file (but with ; seperators is ok) made with bb edit/

[Joel Cherney]

Well, no, without screenshots or sample files, I can't tell you exactly what is wrong. I have some guesses, though. BBEdit is very versatile, and while it's been a long time since I used it, I am certain that it can save files with either PC (CRLF) or Macintosh (UNIX-style /n) line endings. I'm pretty sure that you can also specify endianness.

In InDesign, there's no control for endianness, and I honestly don't know what it wants. But if you have your Encoding set to Unicode and your Platform set to Whatever It Is You Happen to be Saving Out of BBEedit, and your Separator set to Semicolon, then it should work. 

If it doesn't work, then there is very likely something wrong with your CSV or TXT or whatever format you're using. Incorrectly encoded characters in field names can cause issues as well, so I stick to straight ASCII in the first row of field names. 

If it doesn't work, I encourage you to post a sample of your data source that doesn't work. I'm sure we can figure out either a) what settings you'd need in InDesign's Import Options, or b) exactly how you'd need to save out of BBEdit in order to have a valid data source.

In your original post, you asked about plugins? If your data source is really just a text file, then that'd probably be overkill. But if you're generating these CSVs or TXTs from a database of some sort, and then trying to process them with BBEdit to get them to import, then it might make sense for you to look into a tool like InCatalog or EasyCatalog. That way, you could skip the export-CSVs-and-massage-them-into-InDesign step, and just connect InDesign directly to your DB via plugin. But I can't make any suggestions more specific than that without a great deal of detail about the rest of your workflow.