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I am using Indesign 2022, A/E language, Ver 17.2 64-bit. I have been struggling to find the best possible way to export a 70-page book in Farsi/Arabic into an epub. Two issues are majorly affecting exporting an epub:
One: Indesign removes all non-joiner spaces. I have to add a new character instead of a non-joiner space and after exporting to epub, edit the book and replace the new character with non-joiner spaces. You can see the example in the image below, highlighted in pink. I have added (ŚŚ) in place of non-joiner space to be easily replaced after export. In a 70-page book, I had to change 700 occurrences.
Two: Indesign inserts span in the middle of the word in a sentence with no specifications or overrides and break the word. In the image below, the word Ł ŁŲ³ŁŲ± has been broken to Ł āŁŲ³ŁŲ±ā rendering the word meaningless. In English, such an example would be a break in between "wo" and "under." It needs to be noted that the book is set to RTL, paragraphs are right-justified, and the language is set to Farsi or Arabic.
I have added an image of what the text looks like in Indesign before export as well.
I hope someone can offer a solution
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Having followed several EPUB/RTL threads in recent months, I am coming to the conclusion that ID's export simply doesn't work reliably with RTL languages and layouts. I would guess that the variant processes are incomplete or at least incompletely tested.
Which means, I am not sure there is a fix for this.
I'd like to hear from anyone who's successfully exported an RTL document to EPUB with either no problems or readily fixable ones.
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Hi NitroPress,
Eventually, I could correct the issues and create the book with no errors. I chatted with Adobe support to no avail as the follow-up emails I received blame the IDPF standard that has not concerned themselves as much with RTL with languages such as Arabic, Farsi, or Hebrew. However, I would like to ask how the non-joiner space gets wiped out when a document is exported into an epub?
The standards for XHTML and HTML are not that different. I create websites in HTML using non-joiner space all the time with no problems. So how come when it comes to exporting the similar text through Indesign, these spaces which are present in a PDF export are completely removed exporting to XHTML?
I can suggest minimizing too-complicated character styles in the text, which eliminates extra <span></span> in the content cutting down the breaks in words and sentences.
I am still open to any suggestion or guidance in streamlining exporting long documents (books and such) into epubs.
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I had to look up (specifically) what a 'non-joiner space' is. As nearly as I can tell from little quick reading, it's a fairly new element in typography etc. and used mainly to interrupt ligatures, which I can see might be a more important issue in Farsi and Arabic. (It is, as I note, the very last item on the Special Character | Other menu. š )
A quick experiment of using one and export to HTML and EPUB shows it is not exported. Maybe this is a quirk of my English/LTR setup, but I'd suspect it's not fully supported in HTML, and thus stripped as an ID-level format element. (EPUB is, of course, XHTML/packaged web layout ā I think you know that but I want this to be clear.)
I don't think there's a solution outside of editing the EPUB files after export. You could try a simple example, go in and add the non-joiner to an exported document, and see which if any EPUB and/or Kindle readers respect it. It may be supported, in HTML, only in advanced browsers.
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Hi NitroPress,
I use the non-joiner in web design all the time. It is very simple for one of the Indesign developers to translate non-joiner to "&zwnj" (Zero-width-non-joiner in HTML) for XHTML. I have my website in Farsi as well as in English. You cannot find any issue with using the ZWNJ. (fa.zinatgroup.com)
There is more info on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_non-joiner
Below, you can see the ZWNJ in different codes:
HTML Entity (decimal): ‌
HTML Entity (hex): ‌
HTML Entity (named): ‌
UTF-8 (hex): e2808c
UTF-8 (binary): 11100010:10000000:10001100
UTF-16 (hex): 0x200C
UTF-16 (decimal): 8204
C/C++/Java source code: "\u200C"
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I have no argument; it does seem to be something that should be inherently supported. Puting in a feature request would be a good idea. (I'd guess it will take little more than adding it to a list of conversion items.)
But right now, it doesn't... so you need to consider a workaround until Adobe thinks it's worth addressing.
Something like a GREP or search-and-replace on the EPUB content file would be the direction I'd try.
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