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Nicole Fung
Participant
January 22, 2025
Question

Tamil Language aren't working properly

  • January 22, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 447 views

Hi there, I'm trying to change an InDesign file from Kalaham to Tamil Sangam MN as the Kalaham font isn't compatible with Microsoft Word (it turns into random words when copying and pasting from Word to InDesign), and we have to make the design in consistent with another Tamil file.

 

The Kalaham file was created by another designer who's no longer in the company, hence we don't have the source text file to reflow the text with the new font.

 

When changing from Kalaham to Tamil Sangam MN:

 

I applied both fonts with the Adobe World Ready Paragraph Composer. Could someone advise? Thank you in advance!

 

 

 

1 reply

Abhishek Rao
Community Manager
Abhishek RaoCommunity Manager
Community Manager
January 22, 2025

Hi @Nicole Fung,

 

I tested the issue and noticed a few things that might help. When copying and pasting Kalaham text from Word to InDesign using File > Place > Select the Word file which contains the Kalaham works: or pasting as "Text with formatting," InDesign retains the formatting and does not convert the text. You can try this and let me know if it works for you.

Reference: 

 

Best,
Abhishek

N
Nicole FungAuthor
Participant
January 25, 2025

Hi Abhishek,

Thank you for looking into this! 

My issue is actually more around changing Kalaham to Tamil Sangam MN in InDesign.

Tamil Sangam MN works well with our Word file and we're using it for another Tamil file, hence we want to keep the consistency.

 

Best regards,

Nicole

Joel Cherney
Community Expert
Joel CherneyCommunity Expert
Community Expert
January 25, 2025

Your Kalaham font was most likely made a long time ago, before the advent of Unicode. That pre-Unicode encoding system won't work with Tamil Sangam MN. If you want to know the details of how we worked with non-Latin langauges in the Bad Old Days, I can tell you the whole story, but it's not really relevant here.  To get your Kalaham text to work with Tamil Sangam MN, you'd need to convert that text to Unicode. That's a task that really can't be done without a post-conversion Tamil review. I mean, you can search for "convert Kalaham to Unicode" and find a converter, but there are often typos or other glitches induced by this kind of codepage conversion. 

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