Participant

Question

InDesign RTL Character Direction flips numbers or misplaces percent to the right

Forum|Forum|6 months ago
September 7, 2025
1 reply
319 views

When I set my Paragraph Style to Middle East Character Formats > Character Direction > Right to Left, the percentage displays correctly on the left side of the number, but the numbers themselves are flipped.

When I set the Character Direction to Default, the numbers display normally, but the percentage sign shifts to the right side, which is incorrect.

When I set the Character Direction to Left to Right, everything is mirrored.

I’ve already set the language to Arabic and tested all possible character direction combinations, but none provide the correct result.

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

If you set the language to Arabic and the direction to Default, then you should get RTL text with LTR numerals. The percentage sign might require special treatment, for a few reasons that wouldn't be important when it comes to selecting the easiest fix: to do a Find/Change on all percentage signs, applying Right-to-Left Direction from the Change Format tool:

If you really want the deep backstory on why your percentage signs are aligning as if they're LTR, just let me know. The short version is that your percentage sign is between an Arabic numeral (default LTR direction) and a parenthesis (which is bidirectional in InDesign) and InDesign's composer looks at 'em both and says "This percentage sign is right in the middle of an LTR run, it clearly should be LTR too". If you switched to Hindi numerals, the percentage symbol would lay out RTL.

A

Anas25667606urilAuthor

Participant

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried the Find/Change method to force % into RTL, but unfortunately it doesn’t solve the problem. The percent sign still shifts incorrectly depending on the number context.

This confirms the issue is not just about character direction overrides, but how InDesign handles the sequence of Arabic numerals with the percent sign in an RTL environment. Other Adobe apps and even Microsoft Word render this correctly, so it looks like a specific bug in InDesign’s RTL text engine.

Manually running Find/Change across long documents isn’t practical and doesn’t reliably fix the problem. This really needs to be logged as a product bug rather than treated as a workaround.

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

I can't say, from looking at your screenshot, why that particular percentage symbol looks like it is still exhibiting LTR behavior. Maybe you could post a sample INDD displaying this behavior? It might be a bug, but it may well be "functioning as designed." I can't recreate the behavior in your screenshot on my side:

so I suspect that there are other elements in your layout that are influencing behavior.

Other Adobe apps and even Microsoft Word render this correctly, so it looks like a specific bug in InDesign’s RTL text engine.

I think that directionality of glyphs that can render as either RTL or LTR has behaved consistently in this way for, in my experience, almost twenty years? Since at least CS2 ME, back when the Middle Eastern editions were developed by Winsoft.

If you can demonstrate that there's a bug, you can report it at indesign.uservoice.com, but I think you'd need to offer perhaps some screen recordings and a sample file to make that case - and I think that if you posted your sample file here, we could figure out why it was rendering incorrectly after being marked with RTL text direction. You're currently posting to what amounts to a user-to-user forum - sometimes an Adobe employee will notice your thread and file the bug report on your behalf, but the only way to ensure that a bug report is filed is to file it yourself. But mostly what you're going to encounter here is people like me, who are not Adobe employees, but who are end-users like you.

Manually running Find/Change across long documents isn’t practical and doesn’t reliably fix the problem.

When I'm working in a right-to-left language and have client requirements for particular behaviors around numerals that diverge from InDesign's default behavior (e.g. "The client wants the numerals in the Farsi translation to stay in Persian numerals, unless they're phone numbers or regulatory statutes, in which case the client wants Arabic numerals used") then I typically write some GREP Styles in the paragraph style to automatically apply character styles to particular patterns of numbers. That helps avoid the drudgery of manual treatment of numerals, parentheses, etc. throughout a document.

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