Hello,
I have read multiple posts on working with mixed text and am pretty experienced with it myself but this time Im just stuck!
I am working with a doc (coming from word) that has mostly english text with hebrew salt and peppered throughout.
Im using world ready par composer, middle eastern indesign, left to right text direction and even have paragraph styles for english and then charachter styles for hebrew- but- some of the text is still getting jumbled/ out of order.
Attaching screenshots below. 1 is from indesign, 2 is from word where the hebrew words are in correct order.
(The real file is a large booklet....)
Happy to send a file to anyone who thinks they can help.
Much appreciated!!
3 Correct answers
wow thank you for your help, attaching the file here with 1 paragraph...
Well, my first bit of advice is "place, don't paste." The only way I can recreate your InDesign layout is by going into Word, copying all the text, and pasting it directly into InDesign. This forces InDesign to treat the whole thing as LTR, which is what you don't want. InDesign does a better job interpreting Word's take on the right-to-left layout stuff if you save your Word file, then File -> Place it.
That being said, I've tried to recreate your workflow. First I pasted the text in, and ma
...
Yes it was just certian periods that were between hebrew words so I manually switched them and it worked!
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I think I see it now. There are a few problems with your Hebrew in Word, and one of them is leading to a really typical InDesign RTL problem.
Your bilingual test in Word is using a few glyphs inconsistently. I started trying to rekey a problem phrase, so I could post it here, and saw that your input text is using Latin-script punctuation where it should be using Hebrew characters. Looks like the writer working in Word could type geresh sometimes?
So, when a given Hebrew glyph (like an aleph) is marked with Hebrew language and "default" direction in InDesign, it will behave in a right-to-left fashion. Similarly, a given Latin-script glyph (say, an H) marked with English language and "default" direction will behave in a left-to-right fashion. However, there are plenty of glyphs which can behave bidirectionally - not just parentheses or typographer's quotes, but periods, or even space characters. So if they're marked with "default" direction, then they might need to reverse directionality according to what characters are around them.
So, if I were in your shoes, the first thing I'd do is ensure that all the glyphs that were supposed to be Hebrew glyphs actually were Hebrew. Then I'd look at ensuring that the spaces in between Hebrew words were marked as Hebrew, and were therefore default right-to-left spaces. Then I might use the keyboard to select the space right after the colon in "mankind: " or the period and the space after the period, and mark them as overt right-to-left or overt left-to-right characters. Alternately, I might scatter some directionality markers around the period and colon to force correct text direction.
But you'll be constantly fighting with text direction if one of the characters in your input text is sometimes a geresh with default RTL behavior, and sometimes a single quote mark that can have bidirectional behavior.
If you'd like more guidance on how to fix this kind of issue, I'd suggest that you actually post your Word file with that one snippet of text, and we can pull it apart forensically and figure out exactly what kinds of remediations are necessary to make it behave properly in InDesign.
Well, my first bit of advice is "place, don't paste." The only way I can recreate your InDesign layout is by going into Word, copying all the text, and pasting it directly into InDesign. This forces InDesign to treat the whole thing as LTR, which is what you don't want. InDesign does a better job interpreting Word's take on the right-to-left layout stuff if you save your Word file, then File -> Place it.
That being said, I've tried to recreate your workflow. First I pasted the text in, and marked it with Arial. Then I used the arrow keys on the keyboard, along with the Shift key, to see how the text is behaving logically around that broken bit.
That's "logical" direction, right? "mankind:" followed by "רוח" followed by "ממללא" followed by a fullstop, followed by Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki ("Rashee," right?).
The problem here is that the period is behaving as if it's a right-to-left period. So, I'm going to apply left-to-right direction to that period manually.
The way that InDesign determines the directionality of a bidi glyph is that it looks at the immediately surrounding glyphs: "Hmm, this is a period. Periods are bidirectional. How should I render this one?" says InDesign to itself. "Well, the immediately preceeding glyph is Hebrew, that one goes RTL. And the space right after the period... well, spaces are bidi as well. What about right after the space? Welp, that's another Hebrew glyph! Clearly this period is sitting in the middle of Hebrew text! I should lay out this period as if it's RTL."
WROOOOOONG
But you can't blame InDesign for getting it wrong. It's only looking at a few surrounding contextual characters Just tell it "no, please lay this period out LTR."
But doing that manually for all the periods in the document would be a lot of manual clicking about, right? If you are certain that every period in the document should be a LTR period, you can do 'em all in a few clicks:
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