How Do you use Cyrillic Fonts (Russian) in InDesign CS4 or CS3

[HerronCreativeWorks]

I have a headline in Russian a client sent me in an e-mail that I need to use on a poster I'm laying out in InDesign.

I downloaded ERUniverse cyrillic font, and when I paste the Russian headline in a text box and go to select ERUniverse cyrillic, there's no Russian!

Also, I go down to the bottom of my fonts there's Hebrew, Japanesse, Chinese fonts, etc...but no Russian.

Please help with instructions on how to use a cyrillic font!!!

[Peter Spier]

If you're lucky, one of the fonts and non-western language gurus will show up, but in the meantime, it sounds to me like this may be set in an old, non-unicode, font so the character mappings are corresponding to the wrong glyphs in you new font.

It will help the people who know about these things help you if you can tell them the name of the font that was used originally to set this headline.

Peter

[Jongware]

I downloaded ERUniverse cyrillic font, and when I paste the Russian headline in a text box and go to select ERUniverse cyrillic, there's no Russian!

That font must not be Unicode enabled. An old hack to insert Cyrillic characters into a regular font was to replace "unused" characters with Cyrillic ones. So, to type a 'de' д, you would insert the character code for an 'ê'.

Modern fonts are Unicode enabled, which simply means that in every font Cyrillic characters are found in the same place. Thus, changing the font does not change the text.

If you are working on Windows, check the Character Map for fonts that support Cyrillic. Select 'Advanced view', Character set: Unicode, Group by: Unicode Subrange. A small window pops up, enumerating all possible Unicode groups. Scroll down and select 'Cyrillic'. Now the character map will only show these characters for each font, so simply scroll through your font list to see which one have them.

(And OSX no doubt has a similar feature.)

The older Windows system fonts Times New Roman, Arial, Georgia, Verdana, and the newer ones Calibri, Cambria, and Candara, and lots of the fonts that came with your InDesign installation support Cyrillic (at least Minion Pro and Myriad Pro do).

It's also possible the original text has not been typed using a Unicode font. If you need a quick check, select some of the text and select the font Arial Unicode (on a Mac, I think "LastResort" will do). If you see useful text, you're okay to go. If not, you have a huge problem. You will have to find the exact font that was used in the original document and use that, or use Find and Replace to change each character to the actual Cyrillic one (and you will need a hardcopy before you can do that).

[Kenneth C. Benson]

Are you saying that the font you downloaded doesn't show in ID's list of fonts, or that when you format some text in ERUniverse cyrillic it doesn't display in Cyrillic?

What platform are you on?

Ken Benson

[HerronCreativeWorks]

I'm on a Mac! I have InDesign CS4 (and CS3).

OK, took this headline: Мы можем зделать Bам Каротажный Бизнес по Необсаждённой Скважине

and pasted it in Text Edit to strip the formatting, then I pasted it in my InDesign document and it shows up as these squares...

I also pasted it in a text box to the left of the canvas, and it shows up, I checked and that font is Times regular. I just changed the text to Times AND IT WORKS (at least in Times).

So I guess that font ER Universe I downloaded is corrupt or something. I need Helvetica Neue Cyrillic and will try to buy it off of Adobes web site.

So I guess that was a bad font or something.

[Kenneth C. Benson]

You couldn't settle for Myriad Pro (which you already have, and which will definitely work)?

My guess is that the ER Universe font was not Unicode-encoded, while the headline was. The characters you need are probably in that font, but you would have to replace each character with the correct one from that font.

Any of the Pro fonts should be able to handle this, but a custom Cyrillic font may use a different encoding. IOW, if the font has Cyrillic in the name, it (perversely) may not display *your* Cyrillic. But an Adobe "Pro" font, or any of the more complete fonts that come with your OS, should work.

Ken Benson

[Kasyan Servetsky · Accepted solution]

Мы можем зделать Bам Каротажный Бизнес по Необсаждённой Скважине

That's total nonsense in Russian. Every word contains at least one error. I can't understand what it means, but it sounds very funny .

When I need to make an old Cyrillic font to work in InDesign, I use FontLab. It's quite easy and takes a few minutes to do.

Kasyan

[HerronCreativeWorks]

Kenneth - yes, I'm using Myrid Pro, it works perfectly! Thanks for the suggestion.

Kasyan - I think that headline says: We can put you in the Open Hole Logging Service business.

I will check out FontLab after I get this poster finished.

Thanks all;

CASED CLOSED!

Dan in Austin, TX

[Kasyan Servetsky]

No, it's abracadabra -- it can't be printed. Probably somebody translated it with Google Translate.

[HerronCreativeWorks]

Kasyan,

Will you please do me a favor and provide an accurate Russian translation for me?

"We can put you in the Open Hole Logging Service Business"

Thanks,

Dan

[Kasyan Servetsky]

Dan,

Russian is my primary language, but I don't quite understand what "Open Hole Logging Service Business" means. Is that a name of some company that fells, trimms, transports timber?

Does this phrase mean -- "We can join you with our business" ?

In other words, to translate it correctly I should know exactly what it means in plain English.

Kasyan

[HerronCreativeWorks]

Kasyan,

I sent you an e-mail.

Thanks,

Dan

[Kasyan Servetsky]

Dan, I haven't received your e-mail.

[Edit] I found it in spam folder.

[Adi Floyde]

This is the funniest tread I have read for a long time. I speak Russian but I could work out what that sentence was supposed to say and my partner who is a native Russian speaker and translator just said ‘What’ in a questioning manor.

[Joel Cherney]

Multilingual typesetting pro late to the Cyrillic party has this to say: Sorry to be harsh, but you really do want to job it out. Hire a pro to do the whole thing from the beginning all the way through typesetting. Although you have no idea how good Kasyan is at writing ad copy in Russian, you'd be better off handing the whole project to Kasyan (with a check) than trying to typeset a translation of dubious worth yourself. To be bluntly honest: my in-house Russian editor won't even tell me what your sentence says; she just laughs at it. Maybe Kasyan is feeling generous, but if not, you really should think about spending some money on this project. It's for an advertisement of some sort, right? It stands to bring you additional revenue? If so, it's worth the money at the outset, as that will aid you in avoiding alienating your entire Russian-literate target market.

Hey Kasyan, what's your minimum charge?

[Geоrge]

Topic-starter, you're make my day.

There is no Russian in your phrase.