How to install Indesign Arabic but keep English (US) settings and preferences?

[aaddiiooss]

Hi.

I'm located in the United States. Approximately 80% of the work I do is in English. However a good portion of my work involves documents in other languages, including Japanese, Arabic and Hebrew.

So I do need support for those languages and also right-to-left formatting.

I work with both Mac and Windows machines.

On my Windows PC I recently had to reinstall everything, but I can't get Indesign to work like it did before. And I'm not sure if I'm not remembering how to set it up, or if Adobe changed something.

Let's take Arabic for example. 

If I choose English/Arabic in my Adobe CC app preferences and then install Indesign, then Indesign installs with everything set up for work with Arabic documents, but it assumes that I'll be working only with Arabic. In other words, the default paragraph style is set to right-to-left and the default font is Adobe Arabic.

Previously, and the way it is currently set up on my Mac, I have Arabic text support, I have the right-to-left features, if I need them, but the default settings are set up for English.

I seem to recall some weird way of doing this where you install Indesign English (US), then uninstall it but keep preferences, then change the Adobe CC app preferences to English/Arabic, and then re-install Indesign somehow so it installs with English/Arabic features, but keeps the English (US) preferences from the previous installation.

Does that make sense?

I tried that now, but when I install Indesign with Adobe CC app preferences set to English/Arabic, it seems to override the English (US) preferences I had left behind.

Is anyone familiar with this, or know how to get to what I'm looking for?

Any help much appreciated!

Thanks 🙂

[Eugene Tyson]

Sorry - I don't think it's possible automatically

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/sync-settings.html

[Zaid Al Hilali]

I'm not sure if using the settings file from the previous installation is useful. I would do the following to change InDesign settings once and for all… 

Open InDesign, don't open any document

In Character Panel:

• change Font name, font size, font colour if necessary.
• Change Language to English from the Dictionary drop list

In Paragraph Panel:

• From the fly-out menu choose Adobe Paragraph Composer (not the World Ready Composer)
• Change Paragraph Direction to [Left-to-Right] 
• Change alignment to "Left Align" 

While you're at it, go ahead and add your corporate colours and font styles if any.

Close InDesign, then re-open it to find the new settings are set to English or LTR for any new document.

[aaddiiooss]

Hi Zaid, thanks for your reply!

Yes, that's pretty much what I do, but then if for example, I have to work on a Japanese document, then I'll need to install the Japanese preferences for Indesign and all those settings, and any other preferences that I've set, will be lost. I'll have to re-do all those. Right?

[Zaid Al Hilali]

I never tried it. I mean keeping settings from existing InDesign say Middle Eastern version. Install another InDesign  version for International English then swap its settings file with that from the Middle Eastern. I never done this.

[Zaid Al Hilali]

Interestingly, this same topic was discussed once again recently. I learnt from a person named Willi Adelberger found in this post that it is possible to get full ME features while keeping Adobe application interface in say German. 

Check the post and see if this is a solution that you can use.