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inesdocarmo
inesdocarmo
Participant
February 19, 2025
Question

Indesign keeps posting text boxes in Hebrew

  • February 19, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 796 views

I have a document that seems normal (dictionary in Portuguese, language in Portuguese, left-to-right writing), but when I copy text from this document to another (or to another computer, I’ve tested), the text appears from right to left and the dictionary switches to Hebrew. After many tests, I realized that it’s related to my Paragraph Styles (even though they are all in Portuguese) because when I break the link to the styles, the paste comes out correctly.

How do I fix this bug in the Paragraph Styles?

I’ve already found previous posts about a similar issue – from English to a paste in Arabic – but no one found a solution.
Thank you!

3 replies

E
Community Expert
Eugene TysonCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 19, 2025

Is your Style based on Basic Paragraph Style?

https://creativepro.com/beware-basic-styles/

 

 

    Joel Cherney
    Community Expert
    Joel CherneyCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 19, 2025

    Also I want to draw a triple underline under Eugene's contribution, here. If you have Word cruft getting into your Basic Paragraph style, and you're basing other styles on the Basic style, then the Word cruft can easily spread throughout your work without the reason being immediately obvious. 

    Barb Binder
    Community Expert
    Barb BinderCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 19, 2025

    Hi @inesdocarmo:

     

    1. Are you using an ME version of InDesign?
    2. Or did the file originate in an ME version of InDesign?
    3. Is it all files or just the one file?

     

    ~Barb

    ~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training
    inesdocarmo
    inesdocarmoAuthor
    Participant
    February 19, 2025

    Hi!
    No, I'm not using a ME version nor it is even installed.
    The file was created in a English version.
    It's just this one file (sometimes, very rare,  this happened when placing a .doc text in other files. Never understood why...)

    Joel Cherney
    Community Expert
    Joel CherneyCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 19, 2025

    If this is a bug, it's a pretty rare bug. It's not officially a bug, but I've collected, er, between zero and three reports of this happening to people on these forums, every year for the last eight years. And I've had it happen to me, once. Usually I use that ME edition myself on a day-to-day basis, but there was a four-month period where I was using the plain-vanilla English version on my kid's laptop, no Arabic or Hebrew work, no old templates, and one day my Basic Paragraph Style just decided that it was Hebrew. 

     

    However, there are a few things to check. 

    1) The dictionary language you showed us in your InDesign prefs isn't relevant here. What language do you have in your preferences in your Creative Cloud app? 

    2) If you close all documents and look at the contents of your Basic Paragraph Style, does it say Hebrew? If so, I think you can set it back to English and probably never experience this again

    3) But your report "this happened when placing a .doc" implies that maybe you're getting some Word cruft mixed in with your InDesign preferences. If 2) above doesn't work, you should consider resetting your InDesign preferences. There's a button for it in the General pane of your InDesign preferences

    4) But if you really just want to fix this one file, let me know and I'll post a few scripts that can e.g. set all of your paragraph styles to English, left-to-right paragraph behavior, et cetera. 

     

      James Gifford—NitroPress
      James Gifford—NitroPress
      Legend
      February 19, 2025

      The document/content has to be getting the Hebrew language setting from somewhere, so the usual questions — does it do it on brand new docs? Or only on existing ones that might have been "contaminated" with style settings from prior projects and paste-ins?

       

      I'd start with a clean doc and make sure things are set to a base Paragraph Style (which is rigorously checked to make sure the language settings are what you need them to be — English, Portuguese, etc.) and that by default, a [None] Character style is selected. (A Char style overriding all your paragraph styles can be a truly mystifying/maddening thing.)

       

      In case you don't know it, InDesign has the double-edged feature of allowing you to set defaults for many things on the fly — if you have nothing selected in a document, changing the color, border, font, Para/Char styles and many other things becomes the new default until you repeat the process to change/disable it. If you don't have a corrupted document, you might have at some point selected a style — maybe a Character style — that has language settings you don't want, and those are carrying forward to everything you try to do. Select known-good styles and settings while nothing is selected or highlighted in the doc, and it will clear those unwanted defaults.

       

      If this persists with new docs and "cleaned" defaults, it's going to take deeper digging. 🙂

        inesdocarmo
        inesdocarmoAuthor
        Participant
        February 19, 2025

        Hi James,

        It's only in this document.
        I did a few more experiences: I wrote a word with no Character style and in Basic Paragraph Style (screenshot under). Then I clicked "Reset to base" and it turned to Hebrew as default.
        As you can see in my preferences, Indesign is set to US English, so I can't understand why and where is that Hebrew default.
        Thanks!

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