Underlining a chacter in Hindi in Indesign

[paithiam]

While using Hindi language text in indesign 6, you have to format the paragraph with "Adobe Word-ready composer" for proper display of the text.

When you try to underline a particular character of a word, that character does not get underlined, instead, previous character gets underlined; or, both characters get underlined. For example, if you want to underline the chracter sh (श) in the word adesh (आदेश) , only the previous character "de" (आदेश) gets underlined. This happens in a word which has more than two characters. Or, when you underline only "tra" in the two letter word patra (पत्र), both the characters (पत्र) get underlined. This happens in two character words. If you underline a first character of a Hindi word, it won't get underlined.

Can anyone explain how to sort out this issue?

[Geоrge]

Did you try to add character style that have only underline option and apply your underline only through applying this style? 

[paithiam]

Yes. Already tried that. 

[Joel Cherney]

It looks like InDesign's character shaping engine has a bug in it. If you have character shaping with HarfBuzz turned on, I think you'll find you can underline Hindi characters as you'd expect. 

[Laubender]

paithiam said: "While using Hindi language text in indesign 6"

Hi Joel,

harfbuzz with "indesign 6" ? Or perhaps InDesign CS6?

Don't think that's possible. This feature was made available the first time with InDesign 2020 version 15.

To enable the feature one needs this ExtendScript code:

app.textPreferences.shapeIndicAndLatinWithHarbuzz = true;

With InDesign CS6 version 8 property shapeIndicAndLatinWithHarbuzz of the text preferences is not implemented.

Note: there is no typo in the name of the property I used in the code.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[Joel Cherney]

Ha! You're completely right, Uwe, my eyes slid right past the version number. 

[paithiam]

So, there is no solution for Indesign CS6? 

[Joel Cherney]

Not so far as I know.

Once upon a time, there was a plugin for InDesign CS6 for Hindi "IndicPlus" by Metadesign, but it looks like it's no longer available. I don't know if it would fix this problem or not, but since it was used for publishing stuff in Devanagari, and since it didn't rely on Adobe's native character renderer, it was maybe a solution, years ago.