Typophile

Losing Hindi Characters in a PM 6.5 > InDesign 2 coversion

Jon Whipple

A colleague has converted a Hindi language brochure from PageMaker 6.5 to InDesign 2. She opened the original .p65 file in ID2 to accomplish this.

The document used a Hindi font called "HindiSanskrit". The resulting converted document has little squares inserted between every few characters. If you select the squares they show as the HindiSandkrit.

We have tested doing this on two machines that have the font installed. It happens on both.

We have determined that these boxes are character spaces. What we need to do is make the boxes go away, and the space remain. Obvious replacements don't seem to work.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Jon

Thomas Phinney

Unfortunately, InDesign (even the new CS version) does not support any "complex script" languages, which includes Hindi and other Indic languages. As your colleague has discovered the hard way, they simply don't work.

Regards,

T

John Hudson

Thomas, if I remember correctly the HindiSanskrit font is an ANSI hack font, which gives very basic Hindi shaping. I suspect the problem is simply in the conversion from a non-Unicode to a Unicode environment in which whatever code was being used as the space in the PageMaker file is not being correctly interpreted in InDesign.

Jon, have you tried replacing the boxes with a space character in another font?

Jon Whipple

Thanks guys.

John: We have tried replacing the character spaces with character spaces from another font in ID2 without success. Would trying the same in PM work? Well, I'm off to try it.

Thomas: ...does not support any "complex script" languages..." It sure would be nice. Here in Vancouver the demands on the public library for multi language publications is high and continues to increase.

John Hudson

Although it lacks many of the fine typography features of InDesign and has a brutally unpleasant user interface, Microsoft Publisher (Windows version) has excellent complex script handling.

Jon Whipple

Okay here's the scoop:

My colleague experimented and found that replacing the character spaces with those from another font in PageMaker before opening in ID2 did the trick.

John: Thanks for the note about Publisher. At least there's something. I wonder though with more and more OS level support for unicode and comlpex scripts in Windows, Mac OS X, and in Linux (especially in desktop environments like GNOME), why more sofware just doesn't start with this capability out of the box...

Jon

John Hudson

In Adobe's case, the software relies less and less on operating system resources for things like text layout. The positive aspect of this is that it makes it much easier for Adobe to provide cross-platform exchangeability; the down side is that they are not able to take advantage of things like complex script handling offered by the OS, and need to develop these things themselves. Their development partners Winsoft, who produce the Middle East version of Adobe apps, have done a very good job implementing Arabic and Hebrew support. Nothing yet for Indic.

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