Reversing text string without installing a different version?

Report · Jul 21, 2023

Hi everyone!

I have a book with a few lines of Arabic. It appears properly in the Word source file, and as you've probably guessed, it's reversed in InDesign.

After a little reading, it seems the solution in many cases is to install a different version of InDesign, which I am not planning on doing.

I don't need this done automatically for Arabic, but would like to find a tool within ID that lets us do this. Is there a way to quickly reverse the order of the Arabic letters? I could do it manually if needed, but, you know...

thank you.

Report · Jul 21, 2023

You need the ME version at least if the document has never been ME version before.

So you can go to Creative Cloud and change your Preferences>Language to the version for Arabic

Then download and install that.

Save the doc - then revert to your previous version of InDesign

If it was ME before, - having ME text

Then it could be as simple as changing to World Ready Composer

https://helpx.adobe.com/ie/creative-suite/kb/arabic-hebrew.html

And then a certain font that supports all the glyphs - whatever that maybe - proabably Adobe Arabic or something like that.

It's quite tricky in some instances

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/arabic-hebrew.html

But you can see the advantage of installing the ME version with the additional tools for Arabic text.

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If you don't want to be doing this

Then create a PDF of the document you have with the text.

Then place the PDF in InDesign

One step further would be use Acrobat to outline the text so the text is no longer Live text and won't move or change suddenly.
Plus you could then edit that text block (in outlines) in Illustrator.

http://kasyan.ho.ua/tips/acrobat/create_outlines_from_all_fonts_in_acrobat.html

Report · Jul 21, 2023

I suppose the ME version would be able to handle LTR languages in addition to the RTL like Hebrew. So if you regularly have this scenario, it would be better that you install the ME version and be done with it.

-Manan

Report · Jul 22, 2023

This might be a dumb question, but is the Arabic text actually assigned the Arabic language at the character level? If you haven't got the correct language assigned you'll have problems.