Thread: Errors introduced by Adobe applications built-in features

Hi Colleagues!

I just wanted to raise the flag on issues introduced by Adobe graphic design applications in localization of content. My goal is for us to compile them and make a list that we may use either as a checklist, when performing QA tasks, or as part of the guidelines for designers to follow when performing their DTP tasks.

I understand these issues may be different depending on the target language. My expertise is mostly based on Romance languages, and I'll kick off by describing a very annoying thing that happened to me when performing a proofreading job on a PDF coming from an InDesign file in Spanish.

CHANGE IN CAPITALIZATION: It seems there is some automated setting in InDesign by which all text following bullets gets capitalized. As few of you may know, RAE rules expressly condemn the use of such capitalization. Bullets should normally start in lower case and be split apart by a semicolon. At first, I blamed the editor who had previously reviewed the bilingual output from the translator. But, to my surprise, his delivery was fine!

Needless to say that, needing to fix that silly mistake is not only frustrating, but also prone to lead you to the overlooking of true errors you should be taking action on.

Hi H, this is not a common mistake to find. The only way this happens is that the paragraph or bullet has an applied style that generates that. It's weird ... but with styles one can do almost anything. The problem is to find that.

What do you mean by "styles," RodrigoDG? Is there a rule, a common denominator or anything to help us discern when this is about to happen?

Even though Indesign is very powerful and intuitive, when using styles it could be a bit messy. But you can still define a lot of variables of how the text will look by setting styles. The problem is that som styles that work fine in English sometimes do not apply in other languages

Originally Posted by santiagop

Even though Indesign is very powerful and intuitive, when using styles it could be a bit messy. But you can still define a lot of variables of how the text will look by setting styles. The problem is that som styles that work fine in English sometimes do not apply in other languages

But this is something you only see once you open the whole thing in InDesign, right? I mean, I can't tell, I can't predict what's going to happen with a file I uploaded to memSource, can I?

Originally Posted by francot

What do you mean by "styles," RodrigoDG? Is there a rule, a common denominator or anything to help us discern when this is about to happen?

Hi Franco,

You can define different variables in a paragraph. That's a style.

I had a similar issue, gentle!


I had a pdf from InDesign in French and for some reason, it hyphenated words in the middle of the paragraph! I've seen it before when the word comes last in a line, you can set it to hyphenate that word instead of jumping into the other line (not my personal favorite) but I've never seen it this way.


Good thing we perform QAs!

Originally Posted by agustinab

I had a similar issue, gentle!


I had a pdf from InDesign in French and for some reason, it hyphenated words in the middle of the paragraph! I've seen it before when the word comes last in a line, you can set it to hyphenate that word instead of jumping into the other line (not my personal favorite) but I've never seen it this way.


Good thing we perform QAs!

That's weird. Maybe the line was manually hyphenated and for some reason when PDF was created the text moved across the paragraph, leaving forced hyphenation in the middle of the line. But I don't believe that could really happened.

Originally Posted by santiagop

That's weird. Maybe the line was manually hyphenated and for some reason when PDF was created the text moved across the paragraph, leaving forced hyphenation in the middle of the line. But I don't believe that could really happened.

The line wasn't manually hyphenated

We couldn't find a logic explanation to it! Maybe someone else can shed some light! :/