Burmese & other language support

[pixelwrangler]

Have a client with a Word document in Burmese. I installed the Padauk TT font, enabled World Ready Paragraph Composer. But after experimenting, I find that I cannot get ANY non-Western characters in any installed font to display in Indesign CC, even if I just choose a non-Western font such as Batang, which I think is part of the standard Windows font package.

I must be missing some basic thing, but have never before worked with a non-Western language document.

Anyone know what the problem might be?

TIA!

[Abambo]

It works, I have been typesetting Chinese and Japanese with the correct font. Look into Google's Noto fonts, I'm sure you will find the correct one: https://www.google.com/get/noto/

Just Copy/Paste your text from Word into InDesign.

[pixelwrangler]

Thanks, Abambo. It turns out the problem was I did not have the correct language settings for non-unicode characters set up in Windows. I have a job that has a pair of Word documents rendered in both Burmese and Nepali. There are several obvious choices for Burmese fonts available (I am trying Padauk), but for Nepali there are many available choices. I am not entirely certain that I can make an InDesign document format correctly in one or both of these languages, as I cannot read either of them. My client is a refugee advocacy group who I've worked for pro-bono for many years.

[Abambo · Accepted solution]

It turns out the problem was I did not have the correct language settings for non-unicode characters set up in Windows.

By @pixelwrangler

So, that problem is now solved, and you can typeset the language?

I don't speak Japanese and Chinese neither, so I'm very dependent on my Chinese and Japanese colleagues to get it right. Your customer probably needs to support you in all this. I agree, best would be, to have a native speaker doing the work...

[pixelwrangler · Accepted solution]

FWIW, the first original Word document showed the Nepali font to be "Preeti", easy enough to locate and install. The other document, in Burmese, strangely enough showed no foreign language font in Word - just the usual "boxes" that display when Word can't "find" an installed font to use. I just tried Padauk, which is a popular Burmese (Myanmar) font, and the characters popped right in.

Since my goal was to get the text into InDesign, just using Place did the trick for both files/fonts..