Mandarin Chinese - Indesign

Hi WOW_NL,

Thank you for posting. Quick alternate answer: you can strip the formatting from the chinese text by pasting (select text, Ctrl+C to copy, Ctrl+V to paste) it into a typical web browser address bar (I prefer Firefox). Then copy again from the address bar (Ctrl+C) and paste (Ctrl+V) into the text frame on Indesign.

This works great if you are completely reworking the formatting of the document for layout, but keep in mind that you will not keep anything from the original formatting.

As of this writing the current version and the one I am using is Adobe Creative Suite 2021 for Windows.

Cheers and Best Regards,

Chris Li 李成就

Source: apologies to whomever thought of this trick first. I have been using this to strip formatting for so long that I forgot where I learned it.

I do copy paste from Word to InDesign and even back with my Chinese text and that works fine. If your font does not support the Chinese character set completly, you will see it. High quality Chinese font sets are expensive and not easy to find. But there exists a free font from Google (Google Noto Fonts ) and from Adobe (same font but different name). My Chinese collegues are happy with those.

There are others coming with Windows, but most do not have bold character sets (like Arial...). I used those formerly, doing bold as an added outline. It works, but is tricky.

Corrections to the Chinese Text may even be done via PDF. My collegues put corrections as comments, and I replace copy/paste the parts.

If your workflow however is to place Word files, that works also fine.

If I have mixed text (ie tradenames in Latin characters in the Chinese text) and some English text in a 2 language document, I use a grep style to adjust the Latin text in the Chinese to be changed to my standard font.

We typeset whole image brochures that way. Word wrap ist mostly no issue. Only rarly do my Chinese collegues correct that. But each time they get text to read, they change one or to Chinese signs.

Tipp: if you are lost in Chinese use Google translate to get an idea on the current text meaning.

2nd Tipp: Chinese is very compact. If the text fits in English, it will fit in Chinese.

Don’t paste, place the Word document and make sure the font you’re using in InDesign supports the Chinese characters.