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A
arnoenzo17628449
Known Participant
October 6, 2020
Answered

Issues with Data Merge and non-latin alphabets

  • October 6, 2020
  • 12 replies
  • 5144 views

I have a document containing of one paragraph of text in 26 languages, among which Russian, and Greek. I placed the unformatted text in a clean Excel file and saved it from there as a tab delimited txt file (I need it to be tab delimited, because of specific layout settings in InDesign.

The texts in Russian and Greek show without issues in Excel, and the font set I'm using in InDesign has the full range of characters for 26 languages. When I straight copy-paste the text in InDesign there are no issues.

When I import the tab delimited txt file in InDesign the error message tells me that the document contains characters that cannot be encoded, and in the preview all the text, except for the ones in non-latin alphabet (they appear in all underscores). The same happens with a number of (but not all) characters with accents on or under them.

 

I'd appreciate any tips or pointers to solve the issue, if anyone knows.
Thanks!

Correct answer Test Screen Name

There is a lot of discussion here, but I think the point is a very simple one. SInce you need tab delimited UTF-16/UCS-2 from Excel, I suggest you save as "Unicode text (*.TXT)". This works for me.

12 replies

Show previous replies
Jens Trost
Jens Trost
Inspiring
October 6, 2020

I don't know how Excel saves the text files, but my guess is you need UTF-16 encoded files to have the full range of characters.
In LibreOffice there's a setting in the Save as dialog..

SychevKA
SychevKA
Inspiring
October 6, 2020

hi,
if txt file is imported by .place method, its first line should be <UNICODE-WIN>, at least for Russian

A
arnoenzo17628449Author
Known Participant
October 6, 2020

The text file is placed by importing the data source (data merge). Each paragraph is called with tne <<reference>> code in the proper places in the document.

SychevKA
SychevKA
Inspiring
October 6, 2020

sorry, i missed excel conversation ))
try to save excel to unicode text, you will not lose tab delimiter,
also you can share your Excel file, maybe someone will test it

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