InDesign Middle Eastern 2024 Bug: RTL paragraph becomes LTR after inserting Forced Line Break

[Shlomit Heymann]

Hello,

A bug was found:

When inserting Forced Line Break inside a Right to Left paragraph direction, although the text direction is defined as "Default", it becomes a "Left to Right" and change the paragraph direction to Left to Right without showing it. When selecting it, it still shows that the mark is in default direction and that the paragraph direction is Right to left although it is not.

1. In Indesign 2024, Middle Eastern Version with Hebrew definitions (Right to Left paragraph direction, Language), open a new document, draw a right to left text box and fill it with place holder text.

2. Place text curser in the middle of a paragraph the has punctuation mark at the end of it for better seeing the problem. Insert a Forced Line Break (Type>Insert Break Character>Forced Line Break.

3. Result: Paragraph becomes a Left-To-Right direction (Punctuation mark appears to left of the paragraph) but it will not show on paragraph panel.

4. Override: Select the "Forced Line Break" mark, go to Character Panel menu, go to Text Direction and select Right to Left.

Reported in User voice

All the best,

Shlomit

[Rishabh_Tiwari]

Hi @Shlomit Heymann,

Thank you for flagging this with us. We've logged a bug, and the team is working on a fix. I'll update the discussion as soon as I hear from the team.

Thanks

Rishabh

[Shlomit Heymann]

Hi @Rishabh_Tiwari 

Do you know when it will be fixed? I'm unable to work on this version also the on the last update which I just did (19.0.1.205)

 😞

Thank you,

Shlomit

[Shlomit Heymann]

Hello @Rishabh_Tiwari When? the new update didn't fix it.please help/

[Jose Munoz Ruiz]

Hello,

are there any news on this?

It has been 2 months since this was reported.

We cannot update Indesign in our company until this is fixed. Currently we need to convert all files sent by our clients to the old version so we can work with them.

Best regards,

Jose

[Joel Cherney]

In another thread about this issue (it was Arabic instead of Hebrew, but all RTL languages are affected by this bug), it was discovered that you could work around the bug by overtly marking the direction of the forced line break as RTL. If it's set to "Default" character direction, it will result in the bug described above. But if you mark its Character Direction as Right-to-left, this doesn't happen. 

Some posters report that @Joseph_Khirey's solution posted below (I recall it was setting cursor behavior to Visual) resolved this behavior, but I didn't find that to be the case personally. I didn't test it all that hard, to be honest; that's because I typically avoid forced line breaks, and so therefore 100% of the Hebrew and Arabic work I've done in v19 has been completely free of forced line breaks. (Except for one I missed; fortunately, we caught it and marked it as RTL before delivery to our client.)

[Joseph_Khirey]

Change the Right-to-Left Preferences like this image and the problem will be solved.

[galiak21329719]

You are awsome!! you just helped me end an excruciating quest for a solution to this hidiouse bug! thank you thank you thank you Joseph Khirey!!!! I virtual hugs!!!

[Jeo_CZ]

Don' t be so exited. I can't recommend this "solution". It's maybe okay for right-to-left texts, on the other hand it completely destroys left-to-right texts so avoid it for multilingual documents.

The only real solution is to wait for InDesign 19.2 (now in beta only).

[Joseph_Khirey]

Hi @Shlomit Heymann,

Change the Right-to-Left Preferences like this image and the problem will be solved.

[Shlomit Heymann]

Thank you but this will be a disaster for multilingual languages and it will not fixe existed ones. This bug should be fixed immidieatly for Middle Easteren languages. 🙂

[Lexidoc]

This doesn't work if your keyboard input is a LTR language.

[Shlomit Heymann]

I'm unable to use the 2024 version and had to downgreade to 2023. This is awful. A new update came out last week but the problem still exist. This should be top priority. It's no logical the Hebrew & Arabic are not working as they should. It's been almost a month since I report it. A month is a long time when using this application is your main job. 

[Willi Adelberger]

1. Do you paragraph and character styles? Or do you format manually?
2. If the whole or the major part of the paragraph has a specific direction, the paragraph style has to have this direction. 
3. Charcter styles are for minor parts in the other direction needed. 
   
   
4. Never work without Paragraph and Character Styles. Avoid manual formatting as it causes always problems. 

[Lexidoc]

This is fine if you're authoring, but when you're formatting inherited documents that have been translated it's a nightmare for multilingual/bidi texts. If I set existing paragraph styles as RTL then all the LTR text is in the wrong direction - why should I have to go back and change every single instance manually when it works perfectly in 2023/v18?

[Willi Adelberger]

Why did you not work with styles on the first place? Working without styles causes many problems. 

You write that applying a RTL style would reverse text. Why? Was the text typeset technically in the wrong direction? That will cause many problems. 

[Jeo_CZ]

The problem has nothing to do with styles. I can't open old documents without rearranging the old texts. I almost send some documents to print (it's hard to even notice the problem in Arabic / Hebrew when you are European). It would be a mistake of many thousand dollars for my company.

You are not obviously a Community Expert for right-left texts. So don't waste your time here and get involve Adobe team to solve this problem ASAP! Thanks.

[Lexidoc]

This is unhelpful. I know this causes problems. I said I work with inherited documents from my client (a translation agency), where I am not the author and I do not know who the author is; the end client may not be the author and I usually don't even know who the end client is. I work with what I am given, which may or may not include styles. I have no influence on how the orginal document is set up. If there are existing paragraph styles, as I said, and I set these (e.g. for Arabic) to have RTL character direction, this sets any LTR text to RTL, so your solution in this case doesn't work.

But this is entirely beside the point. The feature worked correctly in the previous version and it doesn't work now. Your workaround here is either impractical or unacceptably time-consuming.

[Joel Cherney]

@Jeo_CZ @Lexidoc @Shlomit Heymann 

I completely agree that this particular bug should have been prioritized by the developers, and I'm actually a bit more steamed about it than you are, because the last time I reported a bug like this (hanging indents didn't work in Burmese) the devs fixed it basically immediately.  So to see a dot release with no fix for this text bug is disappointing and frustrating.

But: I don't understand why it's such a showstopper. Why not just change all forced line breaks/soft returns to Right-to-Left character direction? Takes eight seconds, resolves the issue. 

[Lexidoc]

Thanks - I guess that would work if *all* the text in the document was RTL, but it's a good mixture of both directions. In any case, I am experiencing this also (I think) with non-breaking spaces, so much the easiest option is to go back to v18/2023 for the moment.

[Jeo_CZ]

Because amy documents are usually bilingual. I can't change the direction for English texts included in document and I don't want to bother with writing some sophisticated grep script for it. It's easier and safer to use the old InDesign version where this problem doesn' t even exist.

Once we pay a hefty subscription, we should have the ability to get the new and working versions. This problem has been known for many months without any attention.

[Joel Cherney]

The documents I work on are typically bilingual or multilingual, as well. So I don't just whack Change All... I look at each change. In a long document with a couple thousand soft returns, it takes me maybe three to four minutes? It's not hard to hold down Alt and whack N until I see a RTL language, then whack alt-H instead of alt-N whenever I see Hebrew or Arabic or Farsi or whatever. 

That being said, I'd agree that we should get a bugfix for this; should have in the last dot release, frankly. However, posting that here, in this community, doesn't really do any of us much good. The place to post about this is at indesign.uservoice.com. In fact, @Shlomit Heymann's original post includes a link to the uservoice! If you've not voted on that issue, please go and do so. If you've already voted, go and post about how you think this bug should receive some immediate dev attention. Here in this community, you're not really going to find Adobe employees, and you're certainly not going to find people from the InDesign dev team, so posting about how you're not getting your desired value for your subscription dollar doesn't do you much good, and additionally tends to make the forum regulars grumpy & less inclined to offer assistance. 

Lastly, I can't recreate this issue with non-breaking spaces. If you can, please do go submit it, either as a fresh bug report, or as a comment on Shlomit's thread. 

[default0ywy2swkhw48]

Thanks Joel.

The problem is that if we have both hebrew/arabic in the same line with multi-digit numbers, it will change the directions of the numbers too, and we can not allow that. It seems that adobe does not deserve our hard earned dollars...

[Rishabh_Tiwari · Accepted solution]

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for your patience. We have started releasing InDesign 19.2, and we have fixed this issue since this is done in phases so, once available in your region, feel free to test and update this discussion if you need further assistance. Here is the link to an article with fixed issues in 19.2.

Thanks
Rishabh

[ARTICREATOR]

Greetings to you and the Adobe team
Is this problem not solved?!
And I am waiting every day for an update to fix this problem
And why subscribe when we can't earn money from it?
Please pay attention to countries other than European and American countries.
They are not your only users.
We are also your old users
Thanks