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Participant
August 15, 2025
Answered

English and Hebrew Text Indesign

  • August 15, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 574 views

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!! 

 

 

 

Correct answer A1231

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:

 

 


Yes it was just certian periods that were between hebrew words so I manually switched them and it worked!

1 reply

Joel Cherney
Community Expert
Community Expert
August 15, 2025
left to right text direction and even have paragraph styles for english and then charachter styles for hebrew

 

How about this? Set all text direction in all paragraph and character styles to "Default" and specify the language English on your paragraph style and Hebrew in your character style. Specifying left to right direction for the whole document will result in backwards Hebrew.

 

A1231Author
Participant
August 15, 2025

Yes my par style is english usa and my char style is hebrew.

A1231AuthorCorrect answer
Participant
August 22, 2025

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:

 

 


Yes it was just certian periods that were between hebrew words so I manually switched them and it worked!