Recently I was introduced to the hidden "World-Ready composer" in InDesign CS4. It is really nice to see a little of how Adobe is preparing for the future in typesetting complicated, right to left languages etc.
After becoming aware of this new composer, some of the documentation I had previously stumbled across in InDesigns AppleScript library became more obvious, "kashidas", "diacritic position" etc.
An example of Arabic in InDesign CS4.
A little searching around the internet, I ended up at Thomas Phinney's fantastic blog, World-Ready Composer in Adobe CS4, where he explains the specifics about what the new composer is for, and why it wasn't officially documented and included in CS4, and gives you a lot of different tools to enable and use these features in InDesign.
The settings
After reading through all the documentation I could find, i have made a short list here, of things that can be applied to text in InDesign CS4 through e.g. AppleScript.
character direction
The direction of the character. Can be default direction, left to right direction or right to left direction.
composer
The text composer to use to compose the text. Can be "Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer", "Adobe World-Ready Single-line Composer", "Adobe Paragraph Composer" or "Adobe Single-line Composer".
diacritic position
Position of diacriticical characters. Can be default position, loose position, medium position, tight position or opentype position.
digits type
The digits type. Can be default digits, arabic digits, hindi digits, farsi digits, Native digits, full farsi digits, thai digits, lao digits, devanagari digits, bengali digits, gurmukhi digits, gujarati digits, oriya digits, tamil digits, telugu digits, kannada digits, malayalam digits, tibetan digits, khmer digits or burmese digits.
kashidas
Use of Kashidas for justification. Can be default kashidas or kashidas off.
keyboard direction
The keyboard direction of the character. Can be default direction, left to right direction or right to left direction.
paragraph direction
Paragraph direction. Can be left to right direction or right to left direction.
paragraph justification
Paragraph justification. Can be default justification, arabic justification or naskh justification.
x offset diacritic
The x (horizontal) offset for diacritic adjustment.
y offset diacritic
The y (vertical) offset for diacritic adjustment.
Small activation script
If you would like to play around with this, I have written a small piece of AppleScriptJavaScript that creates a paragraph style with these settings:
- character direction: right to left direction
- composer: "Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer"
- digits type: arabic digits
- paragraph direction: right to left direction
- paragraph justification: arabic justification
- kashidas: default kashidas
- diacritic position: opentype position
The AppleScriptJavaScript can be downloaded here: create_arabic_pstyle.jsx. Modify the script to your needs, the AppleScriptJavaScript syntax should be quite easy to understand.
You can add it to your Scripts palette and run it from there. To do that, place the file inside the "~/Library/Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version 6.0/Scripts/Scripts Panel" folder.
Comments
Dan wrote:
Do you know of a similar script for CS3 to do a right to left text flow for Arabic script for a non-ME version? Thanks!
Silkjaer wrote:
Dan: Unfortunately not. The World Ready composer was (as far as I know) first added to InDesign non-ME in CS4.
Kourosh wrote:
My CS4 does not have such "Arabic". Where the hell is it?
Silkjaer wrote:
Kourosh: You need to download and run the script to create an Arabic paragraph style. You can also edit the script to e.g. make a Hebrew or Hindi style.
Note that these options are hidden by Adobe, so they are officially unsupported.
sorour wrote:
give me a error when run it!
Carolyne wrote:
Brilliant! Edited script to font i wanted, it ran perfectly :) I still don't know where to find 'kashidas' and 'arabic_digits' in InDesign CS4 – but the Script & Paragraph Style does, so who cares lol!
RIGHT-TO-LEFT, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi ... IN INDESIGN CS4 (NONE-ME) - EmiratesMac wrote:
...wing are the list of these plug-ins 1- Free script by Thomas Silkjæ of indesigning.net. More info. InDesigning.net :: Right-to-left, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi ... in InDesign CS4 (none-ME) Download the script from here: ...
ben wrote:
could you pls be more specific how to install and run the script? ;-)
Chan wrote:
Hi, Is it only for InDesign CS4? or can it be used in other CS4 such as Flash CS4?
Nubitek wrote:
What if you don't want to do the whole paragraph.
Can this script be made to do a character style instead?
Thanks.
fatmeh wrote:
Hi,
I downloaded (World-Ready InDesign) but still when I try to type in arabic the chercters are displied but are not connected so what is it that I doing wrong.
Please help, I need to type in arabic and need to know why is the cherceters and
type aprt from each other ? ? ? ? ? ???? and not like this
???? ????????????????????
Ron Choo wrote:
@Dan
"Do you know of a similar script for CS3 to do a right to left text flow for Arabic script for a non-ME version?..."
Yes, there is one. It's IndicPlus (http://www.metadesignsolutions.com/indicPlus).
It's an excellent plug-in from a third party vendor. It's really powerful, is available for all CS2, CS3 and CS4. Apart from Arabic Script, it supports a number of other complex scripts.
They also have a free trial version of this plug-in. Worth a try.
cheers
RC
Brecht wrote:
Do you have a version for inDesign CS5 please?
Brecht wrote:
It seems to work with indesign CS5, just have to select an installed font...
thanks anyway!
Arash wrote:
I'm trying to run this script on CS5 and it just keeps saying error number 45... what is there a way to bypass this?
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