19
Replies
Some characters are missing? I don't think that this sounds like a case where the font is not showing up in InDesign, right? I suspect that you're working in Cambodian and haven't turned on the World-Ready Composer. If the font shows up in the list, it's installed. If it's not rendering your Khmer text as you'd expect, it's probably because you're not using the correct Composer:
This can be set in a bunch of places (in Paragraph Styles, in Type -> Apply World-Ready Composer, the Justification dialog I've shown here, etc.). That's where I'd start. If this isn't the issue, can you please provide some more detail?
Also, please note that Khmer Sangam MN is not a Microsoft font, but part of OS X's infrastructure for displaying Khmer. I think it's an AAT font (Advanced Apple Typography) and I have no idea how well it works in InDesign, or if you'll be able to get it to work at all.
While it's true that missing fonts have nothing to do with the composer being used, this question isn't about missing fonts, but missing characters. If you don't know how Khmer type is composed, it's really easy to see an uncomposed vowel sign with its little empty dotted-line circle and think that there is a missing character, when no character is missing:
No, I only included that screenshot to show what that particular composition failure looked like. See, when you see that dotted-line circle, you're not actually seeing a missing character. You're seeing a glyph that, when properly typed and properly composed, will combine with the glyphs next to it to render correctly. Kinda like this:
So, that's not a "missing character" at all. A missing character would be what it looks like when you have set text in a font that doesn't posess a particular glyph. Turns out that Trajan Color doesn't have any accented glyphs at all, nor does it have a solidus! You can see that I have the missing-glyph pink highlighting turned on:
I've gone further and made a preflight profile that shows me every dropped glyph:
So, I'd say that the thing to do when you encounter a missing glyph is to think about the font you're using. If it doesn't have all the necessary characters, shouldn't you change it? Some people are okay with substituting only the missing glyphs. That can go okay sometimes; e.g. using weird glyphs from Times New Roman when working in Minon in less-frequently-encounterd languages that Minion doesn't cover. But I don't trust it. I especially don't trust the silent auto-substitution of glyphs that happens when you turn on Missing Glyph Protection in Preferences -> Advanced Type:
I must not be understanding your question, then. You don't do any manual insertions with the Glyph menu. Unless you are the Khmer editor and you say "Oh yeah, translator used the wrong tone mark here, how do I fix it in InDesign?" I don't think that is what you are asking; please do correct me if I'm wrong.
Assuming the text is correct from your Khmer translation provider, then the thing you have to do to make sure that it renders correctly is to use the correct formatting and the correct composer, and to know InDesign's limitations. At no point should you personally need to use the Glyphs menu to fix composition. Here's exactly what I would do if I were in your position:
1) I'd use File -> Place to insert Word files with my Khmer paragraphs into InDesign. (Again, copy/paste should probably work, but I don't trust the clipboard.)
2) I'd apply Paragraph Styles with Khmer MN font applied, Khmer language applied, the WRC turned on, and the amount of default leading increased:
3) I'd finish formatting my document, then I'd make a quick PDF and I'd probably send it back to my Khmer translator, because I know that InDesign can't be trusted to get the line breaks correct in Khmer.
As an aside for other future readers of this thread, having problems with Khmer layout in InDesign... I do have some clients with Khmer translators who know how to use zero-width spaces correctly, and so I don't have to necessarily run those through post-DTP linguistic QA for line-break purposes. But other translators are less willing to work in this way (I mean, how many times in one's life can one be told "Forces external to your culture are changing the way you type your language! Get ready to re-learn how to touch-type with a new keyboard layout! Again!"), and I just assume that translator review is Always Advisable.
There's a lot going on, here; maybe I can help sort it out.
1) Calibri doesn't have any Khmer characters in it at all; that's Word misreporting the font being used. However, I'm sure we can figure out what kind of font will support your Khmer characters in Word. Courtesy of Apple forcing you to have All The Multilingual Fonts installed All The Time, you have some known working Khmer fonts already installed.
2) If you really did need to extract a Microsoft Word font from the app, Willi's instructions would have been accurate. You'd need to context-click not on your Word document, but your Word app:
But you don't need to get your Calibri font out of your MS Word app; that won't help you with your Khmer layout.
3) Copying and pasting your Khmer text into InDesign is more risky than using File -> Place and then placing the whole Word doc. That probably doesn't matter here, but it's worth pointing out, on the offhand chance the next step doesn't work.
4) Way back in 2022, I posted that, if it looks to you like some characters are missing (not a missing font, but some characters), then you likely don't have the World-Ready Composer turned on. In order for your Khmer text to render correctly, you must turn the WRC on. There are a few ways to do that - you can turn it on in your paragraph style, for example. You can find it in the little flyout menu (I hate the phrase "hamburger icon") in your Paragraphs panel. In the following example animation, I'm using Control-Alt-Shift-J on Windows; on a Mac, you'd use Option+Command+Shift+J.
AdChoices
