Is it possible to limit a line to display a fixed number of full-width characters (punctuation also counts as a full-width character).
I've tried squeezing with punctuation and it's very difficult. Can this be achieved with a grid?
The full document can be downloaded here
http://www.fileconvoy.com/dfl.php?id=gd80ea56218e503b21000557081cc18f8d3243df996
7
Replies
In general terms, I can't think of any solution but (1) centered tabs for each of the lines or (2) a table with an appropriately formatted Cell Style etc.
By @James Gifford—NitroPress
(1) would require adding tab befre each character?
(2) would require converting each character into a separate cell?
At least there are spaces already:
unfortunatey not after "," - but that will be easy to fix.
After adding few extra spaces and hard returns to split into lines and converting to table with "space" as a column separator:
(I've used a different font)
I know the CJK version of InDesign has grid-based glyph layout, but it may be only for Japanese. I am not sure if Chinese is supported or can use the character grid.
It's supposed to support Chinese, but in practice, apparently it's not easy. I'm told that it's fairly easy to typeset Chinese with a Japanese UI, assuming you already know Japanese typesetting terminiology, but that the Chinese UI itself has some severe localization problems. That linked article is a better summary of the problems than what I'd be able to write up, but it confirms much that I've been told - that the source of the translation for the Chinese UI was clearly the English translation of the Japanese translation. Also apparently lots of translations get cut off because the menu isn't wide enough, which is (trying not to post like a grown-up, over here, and not fulminate about it) the kind of UI problem that should be caught in a QA check embedded in the localization process.
So @dublove there are plenty of ways to get the CJK toolset with an English UI, one of which is the Windows registry hack posted over at Ken Lunde's blog. But I think that the fast way to get the layout you are asking for is to place a space after every fullwidth character, including punctuation. Or,.remove all the spaces and use tracking (for EN UI) instead? I found that your ruby/Latin-script transliteration became misaligned if I tried to use Roman tracking, but 1) a space after each bit of punctuation + 2) turning off justification and simply left-aligning the text caused the columns to align:
If you're using a version of InDesign with a CJK toolset, you can control the grid layout directly - at least in the English UI.
Not sure which sample you mean, @dublove . I've attached an INDD, and here's a brief animation showing exactly what I did. The GREP find/change is meant to find any two non-space characters and put a space between them:
If you're looking for an example of the CJK character grid layout, then... I'll guess I'll have to make one, but I've not had a CJK install of InDesign for a few years. If that's what you are looking for, let me know, and I'll eventually throw one together.
AdChoices