Myanmar font issue

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
November 17, 2023
2 replies
3810 views

We are preparing a book in Myanmar (Burmese) using InDesign. We have an issue with Myanmar font after we placed the text from our MS Word document. We use Noto Sans Myanmar font. It is OK on Word, but it does not appear correctly for some strokes on InDesign (please see below).

Thank you, Chit

Type

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James Gifford—NitroPress

Braniac

There are always a number of issues when working with extended-alphabet languages, but first... is the file from MS Word or from an alternate app such as Pages or Google Docs, and exported or saved to Word format? InDesign is very fussy and does not always import Word-clone files correctly. (The simple solution is to open and re-save such files from a copy of Word itself.)

C

Chit33673432hhubAuthor

New Participant

The imported file is an original MS word file. We opened/resaved it on MS word again and tried to place it into InDesign. InDesign rendered it the same way as before. We are stuck and don’t know how to proceed. We use the Apple Mac system. Thank you very much for your reply.

Joel Cherney

Braniac

I found a way to import Myanmar font correctly into InDesign. I set the Paragraph Style as "Body", Character Language as Burmese (Myanmar Burma) and set the composer as "Adobe World-Ready Single-Line Composer” in advance Type / Preference. Myanmar font shows up correctly as it appears on MS Word. However, I haven't used InDesign in a very long time and I’m like a novice user now, and not too sure if my fix is the correct way. So I did not share it with the InDesign community. I still cannot figure out how to automatically insert page numbers in Myanmar font. It only works with Roman fonts. Thank you very much, Chit

Your fix is the correct way, more or less - it doesn't matter how you apply the World-Ready Composer to your text, and it doesn't matter that much whether you choose the single-line or paragraph composer. (Try them both on a paragraph to see the difference; it's sometimes important in Burmese to use the multi-line as InDesign isn't very good at Burmese line-breaks, and typically the paragraph composer is a little bit better.)

The fix for Burmese page numbers is a bit more complex. InDesign's text layout engine has support for Burmese digits, but there's no real support in the interface. If you know how to install and run a script, this one will create a paragraph style that has Burmese digits turned on.

/*
	Add Paragraph style with Burmese numbering by Joel Cherney
	Based on "Khmer Page Numbering.jsx"	version: 1.1 by Thomas Silkjær
	
*/

var my_document = app.documents.item(0).paragraphStyles.add({
	name:"BurmeseDigitsSupport",
	characterDirection:CharacterDirectionOptions.LEFT_TO_RIGHT_DIRECTION,
	composer:"Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer",
	digitsType:DigitsTypeOptions.BURMESE_DIGITS,
	paragraphDirection:ParagraphDirectionOptions.LEFT_TO_RIGHT_DIRECTION,
});

This will create a paragraph style that will number in Burmese digits. You'd need to edit the resulting "BurmeseDigitsSupport" paragraph style to add a font that supports Burmese.

Here's a screenshot of the paragraph style definition; note that InDesign can't tell us what digits are being used, as the UI and localized menu names don't have a string for Burmese digits.