Chinese Text in CS2

[f***@adobeforums.com]

I'm a student and I don't have the money to afford CS3 as I know it already comes with chinese text however I am helpign someone now who wants both chinese and english text but is there any chnace of putting chinese text/characters into the page? I think there may be already english text that could be changed to the chinese font, thanks

[D***@adobeforums.com]

There used to be a permanent thread at the top of the discussion list about using CJK type with ID Windows, and you can still find the corresponding item in ID's Mac forum -- worth a look if you have not seen it already. IDCS2 can handle Chinese text pretty well for setting text left-to-right, and this includes letting you mix Chinese and alphabetic text within a single line. However, simply changing the font of English text to a Chinese typeface does no more than apply the letters in the Chinese font to your English text. If you want to see text in Chinese characters you must supply the required character codes. If you want to type Chinese, you can install one or more Chinese input systems from the Windows system CD.

Good luck!
David

[AlFerrari]

I think there may be already english text that could be changed to the
chinese font, thanks




fiona may already be aware of this, but it's worth mentioning that in addition to using a chinese font, the text also needs to be translated to chinese.

Al

[f***@adobeforums.com]

I'm afraid I don't have the cd but these fonts should be able for download use? Now I don't understand the chinese translating fully but I think there's other people who can translate which is a good for Indesign use. Any recommendations for chinese fonts of all types?

[K***@adobeforums.com]

Indesign CS2 comes with Adobe Song.

[K***@adobeforums.com]

Indesign CS2 comes with Adobe Song.

[D***@adobeforums.com]

And Adobe Song is a nice font, with a large character set (over 30,000) that has grown with succeeding versions: CS3 comes with version 5, which contains a few characters (punctuation variants) that were not included in the version that came with CS1.

If someone else supplies files containing Chinese characters, fine and dandy, you won't have to install a Chinese input system. However, the files might use a different Chinese font, causing the characters to show up as the dreaded pink boxes (indicating out-of-font characters) when you bring them into InDesign. If so, you can swap the font for Adobe Song. Assuming you are on Windows, you may find you have Window's Chinese fonts installed already: MingLiU and Simsun are the most common; these will be installed along with the Chinese input system if the latter's installer does not find them on your system already.

[f***@adobeforums.com]

ah yes I do have Adobe song I noticed it there but I really don't understand how to input it since I'm the only one who knows Indesign (the rest use Quark but that's a different problem to be solved). I'm very sorry I don't have much technical understanding of this. I am downloading Simsun just in case.

[J***@adobeforums.com]

Fiona, can you go into a little more detail? It sounds to me like you are helping a friend who wants to make a bilingual English/Chinese document in InDesign. Perhaps you're both college students? This is not very hard, so don't worry about the technical stuff for now.

So, has the Chinese text you want in ID already been written? You say that "I really don't understand how to input it." I can't tell whether you mean "My friend and I don't know how to type Chinese directly into InDesign," or "My friend and I don't know how to get this Chinese text we've already typed in Word (or Quark?) into Indesign." David covers both these possibilities, but it sounds to me like you will need step-by-step instructions for either typing Chinese into ID, or placing and manipulating Chinese text from a word processor into ID.

You won't need SimSun to do it, either. Besides, SimSun is - forgive me for being blunt - pretty ugly. If there's going to be any English text in your Chinese document at all, don't use SimSun. Adobe Song will be fine for simplified/mainland Chinese.

[K***@adobeforums.com]

No problem with Chinese and English, either mixed or in separate threads or in footnotes or in endnotes.

I use Simsun, and no, it's not so ugly.

In fact, the docs I've been doing have "stories" in traditional characters, stories in simplified characters, English stories,and characters (lots of them) mixed with the English in endnotes, all of this in the same doc. Been doing this even before CS2.

So no, there are no problems unless you try to go way back to the first releases of ID where they did a lousy job of handling Chinese punctuation rules.

Mitra

[J***@adobeforums.com]

I use Simsun, and no, it's not so ugly.




I suppose I should have surrounded my comment with "personal opinion" tags.