Known Participant

Question

How do I get Punjabi text to display properly?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
October 10, 2022
6 replies
10901 views

Hey all; I'm migrating a book from English to Punjabi. (I don't read Punjabi or any Indic language) The translator provided me with a PDF and a word doc and I'm basically just to cut and paste it paragraph by paragraph but for some reason when I paste the text into InDesign it looks different.

Here's an example - the bottom text is the PDF that the translator provided, the top is my InDesign doc. (Actually a brand new doc as I was worried the leftover styles from the English were maybe the issue); I've circled a few of the glyphs that look wrong/different but its peppered all through the text.

I've run the Indic Prefernces .js script, and set the default composer to "Adobe World-Ready paragraph Composer" in the Advanced Type Paragraphs. I'm using Arial Unicode MS font (Because that's what the translator suggested though I also tried Gurmukhi to no avail) and set the character to Punjabi (India) - I'm on Adobe's Creative Cloud and pulling my hair out. Any Punjabi InDesign experts have any insights what I can do or what's going on? Cheers in advance.

J

jagnagra

Participant

I've figured it out after weeks of struggling.

I checked and unchecked so many different options in all my settings and finally came across this in the Paragraph tab. Select "Middle Eastern and South Asian Every Line Composer" and it fixes all the wonky jumbled characters.

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

That's how to get these fonts to render more-or-less correctly in Illustrator, but you've posted your solution in the InDesign forum. You're not wrong, though!

kbirkemoe

Participant

Hi there,

Curious if you found a solution that worked. I am working on a multi lingual set of documents and the Punjabi set has turned into a nightmare. I'm in the exact same situation where I need to find a solution for my client. I have tried all of the Gurmukhi fonts available through Adobe to no avail. I'm going to try AWC tonight but if you found a solution I would love to hear it. Thanks so much in advance.

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

I have tried all of the Gurmukhi fonts available through Adobe to no avail.

Can you post a screenshot of it not working? Can you tell us anything about how the text got to you, and how you're working with it? Were you supplied with Word docs or IDML or XML, or something else?

As far as the sentence of yours that I quoted above, there's not that many possibilities regarding what could be going wrong.

Either

1) You haven't turned on the World-Ready Composer

or

2) You have something written in in a pre-Unicode font

If it's number 2, that'd be clear from the screenshot, because most of the common pre-Unicode encodings for Indic languages are pretty obvious when you look at 'em without the correct fonts installed. If the text is rendering more or less like Gurmuhki, but there are missing marks or ligatures that aren't working correctly, then it's almost certainly going to be InDesign language settings, particularly the World-Ready Composer.

kbirkemoe

Participant

Hi Joel, Thanks for getting back to me. The text came to me via a word document (font says Callibri) and then corrections via mark-up comments in the PDF I generated. I've turned on the World-Ready Composer and switched to a different Gurmuhki font which has corrected most of the issues. One character combo ਕ੍ਰ still is apprearing differently. See attached here , the little ligature or descender is centered instead of attached to the bottom right. I'm hoping that is stylistic and still legible but I don't know the language so unsure. I've turned ligatures off and on but it didn't make a difference. If you have any ideas, I would be incredibly grateful. Thanks again!

Rishabh_Tiwari

Community Manager

Hi @Pomodu ,

Sorry to hear about the trouble. Could you please share a few more details like:

The version of InDesign & OS.
The font details used on the original file?
Is this happening on any other application as well?
Will it be possible for you to share the word document for testing? If yes, you can DM me by clicking on my name.

Regards

Rishabh

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

Complex script text like Punjabi won't render correctly if you haven't turned the World-Ready Composer on. The way I'd do it would be to place the translator's Word document, so I'd get all the Punjabi text all at once in one story. That may or may not work for you, I dunno. Then, I'd go to Type and select Apply World-Ready Composers. That applies the WRC to all of the text in your document.

You do say that you've turned the WRC on, but there are plenty of ways that you could have clicked on Type-Apply World-Ready Composers and have it not apply to your text. For example, that tool doesn't change your paragraph style settings. If you copy your Punjabi paragraph to the clipboard, then draw a new text frame, then the paragraph style applied won't have the WRC turned on (unless you edited the style yourself, manually).

Lastly: you can check to see if the WRC is on for a given paragraph yourself. Select all glyphs in a paragraph with the Text tool, then go to Type -> Justification (or whack Control-Alt-Shift-J, on Windows, the Mac shortcut is Option-Command-Shift-J) and look at the dropdown. I feel 99.44% certain that the sample paragraphs in your posted screenshots have the Composer set to Adobe Paragraph Composer; that's just what it looks like on Punjabi when the WRC is not turned on.

J E L

Community Expert

Hello again, @Pomodu. I received this message today from Adobe:

It seems like a copy paste issue. The MAX update ID 18.0 consists of Copy Paste Enhancements, plz ask the user to try again with the new version later today.

After the new release is installed, please come back to let us know if the new version solves your issue. If not, would it be possible for you to share a sample file showing the problem so we can better analyze this for you?

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

I have a real hard time letting this advice go uncommented-upon. This is not a clipboard issue. The only new clipboard features I see in the new product announcement are related to copying between Illustrator and InDesign - although maybe one of the other regulars who are paying closer attention to new features can correct me if I'm wrong.

Also, updating to the latest release right before trying to do deliver a product to a client is, in my own humble opinion, a dangerous strategy. Maybe it's my decades of being a Mac user talking here, but I never install any software update the day it comes out, and I never try to put the x.0 release into production if I can possibly avoid it. Almost every single time, for every single app, there's going to be an x.0.1 release within a day or three that patches something nasty.