Typophile - Uniscribe and InDesign - Comments

even if on the adobe site,

arifkarim — Thu, 1 May 2008 16:16:58 -0700

even if on the adobe site, it says that new indesign cs3 supports fully opentype, its completely a joke! i downloaded few adobe trials in a greed to see... but no! a complex nastaliq charachter based opentype font is adobes enemy, while ligtures are working fine... that is a big shame for adobe....

http://www.laoscript.net/ The

Thomas Phinney — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:39:31 -0700

http://www.laoscript.net/

They offer a plug-in for InDesign CS2 and later. I know nothing else about it, so I can’t vouch for it in any way.

Cheers,

I am facing this same

CarolynLP — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:38:12 -0700

I am facing this same problem. I have a large document (1700 pages) in Lao using Uniscribe to display the glyphs. I need to import this text into something other than Word (Quark, InDesign, Pagemaker, Framemaker) and combine it with newly created text.

Can anyone help over come the problem that Adobe doesn’t have a conversion from Uniscibe?

please delete (is it me or

beachmat — Wed, 2 Apr 2008 07:29:05 -0700

please delete (is it me or is the site running really slow)

please delete

beachmat — Wed, 2 Apr 2008 07:28:20 -0700

please delete

Jenny, our Thai friends use

beachmat — Wed, 2 Apr 2008 07:25:44 -0700

Jenny, our Thai friends use a plugin for Indesign called Thai Support Plugin, which adds support for various kinds of Thai font and does acceptable Thai line breaks, which we have, so we could give you some help with that job if you still need it. There’s also another cheaper plugin for CS3 which does Thai line breaks but I haven’t tried it.

We call the shift+enter a

emenninga — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:13:20 -0800

We call the shift+enter a “soft return” because it forces a line break without forming a new paragraph. The discretionary break is an optional break that doesn’t insert a hyphen or anything. We don’t assign it a keyboard shortcut, but one could. Numerically, the soft return is U+000A, paragraph break is U+000D, and discretionary break is U+200B.

Well, you could set the text

John Hudson — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:42:39 -0800

Well, you could set the text in Word, using the same text block size as in your target InDesign document, make use of Word’s Thai dictionaries for linebreaking, and then you could insert hard linebreaks at the end of every line, and copy/paste the text into InDesign, preserving the Word linebreaks.

Or, perhaps tidier on the InDesign end, you could paste in the text without hard linebreaks from Word, and then use the (printed) Word setting as a guide for where to place discretionary linebreaks (shift+enter/return) in InDesign. This would produce correct linebreaks but wouldn’t treat every line as a separate paragraph.

Unfortunately it won’t be

Jenny Man — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:07:38 -0800

Unfortunately it won’t be practical to get in a native proofreader - not on a regular basis anyway. So i’m a bit stuck. Other than working in MS Word and exporting as a pdf to an Adobe program - would you suggest any other method? (However radical!)

thank you thank you thank you...

Linotype was mentioned

John Hudson — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:34:20 -0800

Linotype was mentioned earlier - can I assume that any one of these should work?

I have the Linotype Sukothai and Sirichana OpenType fonts, and can confirm that they work in InDesign CS3 (with Eric’s caveats about linebreaking). I can also confirm that the ’Adobe Thai’ fonts work — I know this because I made them. :)

I have put a PDF of samples of the fonts, set in InDesign CS3, online at

http://www.tiro.com/John/ThaiCS3samples.pdf

The linebreaking issue is a tricky one, and you would need a qualified native proofreader.

Thanks for the responses -

Jenny Man — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 04:26:27 -0800

Thanks for the responses - what a relief to know that i’m not alone!

It appears to be possible to upgrade to CS3 and get hold of some OpenType Thai fonts, although this is not guaranteed to work. Plus there may be some manual tweaking required, which I would not be confident in doing not being a Thai speaker. I could always download a trial of CS3 to try it but it looks like the choice of font is key to the correct alignment of accents. Linotype was mentioned earlier - can I assume that any one of these should work?

A silly question - but how do our Thai friends get around it? Is it that the whole system from hardware to operating system - is set up for it?

With thanks

As the engineer on InDesign

emenninga — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 11:16:29 -0800

As the engineer on InDesign who added improvements for Thai in CS3, I want to be as clear & honest as I can. We took some steps towards Thai support in InDesign, but we do not claim to have reached our minimal level of support (yet). The same is true for other scripts. For Thai, there is InDesign Thai which I have heard of, but haven’t evaluated.
Anyway, for Thai:
1) We do not use AAT or Uniscribe. In fact, we only do the correct positioning of marks using OpenType fonts that do the positioning themselves using ’mark’ and ’mkmk’ features. Microsoft’s original Thai fonts had a table-based way of doing mark positioning using some PUA accent glyphs, but we don’t support it. I think InDesign ME and InDesign Thai both support the Microsoft legacy fonts, but not AAT fonts. (not sure)
2) In CS3 we did not utilize any code to break Thai phrases correctly. The user would have to insert “discretionary line break characters” manually (U+200B: zero width breaking space). FYI, Thai doesn’t use spaces between words, but still expects line-breaks to occur between words. There are free algorithmic approaches available which we are investigating.

The InDesign team believes that extending our script support is a good long-term business opportunity, but as pointed out above we have to implement a cross-platform solution and (more critically) we are unwilling to release something under the “Adobe InDesign” label unless it reaches a pretty high level of quality. And, of course these features compete for resources with every other wish-list...

PS. One very important thing

John Hudson — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 10:13:57 -0800

PS. One very important thing to note: when setting Thai text in InDesign CS3, in the language drop down list you have to select ’None’. InDesign does not include Thai spellchecking or grammar functionality, but Thai layout may not work correctly if the text is identified as any other languages.

Jenny, there are two issues

John Hudson — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 10:11:48 -0800

Jenny, there are two issues here: one is that CS2 does not support Thai layout at all, and the other is that the Mac OS X Thai fonts are probably AAT format rather than OpenType, i.e. they use Apple’s own layout intelligence model rather than OpenType’s, which means that they will also not work in CS3 or anywhere else in Adobe apps.

So if you want to use those particular fonts then you will need to set the text in a Mac app that uses AAT layout. What you might be able to do is to set individual blocks of text in such an app, export or print them to PDF, and then embed the PDFs in your InDesign app as graphics. This is what I do when I need to include text in InDesign documents using scripts or font formats that are not supported by Adobe.

Another option, if you don’t mind updating your software and switching fonts, would be to install InDesign CS3 and use some OpenType Thai fonts. The Adobe Thai font family ships with Acrobat 7.0.5 and later (look in the Acrobat/Fonts folder) and is good for text. Linotype have just launched OpenType versions of their classic Sukothai and Sirichana typefaces.

I have been told that CS3

dan_reynolds — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 04:47:53 -0800

I have been told that CS3 supports Thai. I believe I read this from John Hudson somewhere here on Typophile. It is my understanding that you cannot do this in CS2, be it on a Mac or on a PC. The international versions of InDesign have been CE and ME – these handled the accents of Central and Eastern European languages, as well as the Right to Left nature of certain Middle Eastern scripts like Hebrew and Arabic. There isn’t an “InDesign South Asia” or anything like that… but if the hints I heard were correct, you’d be just fine with your Thai texts as long as you upgrade!

Uniscribe and InDesign

Sw MY — Mon, 9 Apr 2007 21:34:17 -0700

Hi Folks,

Uniscribe and Devanagari (or any complex script): the glyph substitutions are not supported by InDesign.

Has anyone written or heard of any conversion tool, that will analyze Uniscribe text (that is, text written in a complex script like Devanagari) and make all substitutions permanent (that is, the actual glyphs, rather than lookups for substitution, will be written), thus making the font useable in InDesign? So it would be a workaround for Indesign and Uniscribe. . .

Thanks.
MY