Thread: Bidi content

And how do Illustrator, Quark or Photoshop deal with RTL content?

Originally Posted by cinchtranslation

Hi

It can be easily sort out take the help of internet it will help you more. And for best ATA certified translation you needs to search out.

Quite a generic response! I bet this could work for any post. I'm sad it's no help at all, but thanks for participating and a happy 2017!

Originally Posted by danielr

And how do Illustrator, Quark or Photoshop deal with RTL content?

Not so easy to answer! Let me see if I can first confirm what I read about InDesign straight from the Adobe Tech Support. I will definitely keep you posted!

Regarding to number notation (mostly decimal notation, for decimals and thousands), when using the Western characters notation generally adapts to the targeted locale. In other words, if you need to express thousands for an Arabic-speaking audience within the US, you will use the Saxon notation (periods for decimals, and commas for thousands). Some people advocate not using any delimiters so that a number in thousands would show as 4500 (neither any punctuation mark, nor any kind of breaking/non-breaking space).

I personally prefer, moreover when I'm sure that it is to be used within the US, to use the Saxon notation.

Originally Posted by danielr

And how do Illustrator, Quark or Photoshop deal with RTL content?

I realized I forgot that, at least in my experience, Quark can not work with RTL languages. Not long ago I was managing a project into four different languages with native Quark files, two of which were RTL (Arabic and Hebrew). Luckily, there's an application that can somewhat easily "convert" Quark into InDesign (with a need for a more or less tweaking of the output). I converted the native Quark into InDesign just for those two languages (as the client wanted to keep Quark as much as possible ).

Thank you, gentle.
Quark is out of the list then.
Maybe Photoshop is not that important, but Illustrator does concern me. I receive projects in .ai files from time to time and some CAT tools don't read them very well. This adds another obstacle because the tool gives a better control of the text and its direction.

I just remembered another problem that I have when checking Arabic projects. It may be due to my unproficiency as a reader, but I've noticed that the fonts are smaller than the Latin text and they do have the same size in Word (let’s say Arial 12).
Has anyone noticed it or knows what causes it?
I avoid changing the font size for those situations and natives haven't complained so far either.

I hope someone with more expertise in formatting can weigh in and clarify your inquiries. Meanwhile, and as promised, a couple of screen shots showing how to work in InDesign.

The first one shows the menu icon on the top right hand side of the screen encircled in red and yellow.

InDesign_RTL-LTR_1.jpg



The second one shows how it's pull-down opens into many different menu items, one of which leads you to the final button where you choose directionality of the text. You need to have the text highlighted and it will promptly fixed as needed.

InDesign_RTL-LTR_2.jpg

Originally Posted by gentle

Hate to break it to you, but InDesign is a whole special chapter!

First off, you need to install your CC version taking special care of the language you use for your personal settings. If you will deal with RTL (either alone, or with BiDi content), you will need to choose a language like English (Arabic) or English (Hebrew). That will enable the menus and buttons you need to work with. https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-clo...-language.html

Hi Gentle,
I'm sorry for bothering you, but do you know how to change the Indd language settings once the program have been installed? Adobe Help says that I need to reinstall the app. Would that affect the other Cloud apps?

Originally Posted by danielr

I just remembered another problem that I have when checking Arabic projects. It may be due to my unproficiency as a reader, but I've noticed that the fonts are smaller than the Latin text and they do have the same size in Word (let’s say Arial 12).
Has anyone noticed it or knows what causes it?
I avoid changing the font size for those situations and natives haven't complained so far either.

Hi Daniel,
We could write tons and tons of entries regarding size differences between fonts families. Font size is determined by the height of the type (in typography, the little block of metal that contains the character symbol) and not by the height of the glyph itself. So, different font families could look smaller or bigger even though they have the same size.
You can read more about this in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font