True Type fonts

[a***@adobeforums.com]

Running ID CS on Win 2000, how do I get ID to pick up true type fonts, I have many of them installed but can see no sign of them when using ID.

Many thanks
Alan

[unknown]

How did you install them? Do other applications see them? What fonts? Have you scrolled the entire font list?

Bob

[P***@adobeforums.com]

A LOT of fonts that come with Windows and Office are TrueType flavored OpenType ( they still have the .ttf extension) and show up in ID as OT fonts with that icon. Are you not seeing the fonts at all, or just not recognizing them because the icon is different from what you might have been expecting to be associated with the name?

Peter

[a***@adobeforums.com]

Hi

The fonts which are not being found in ID are Arial Unicode MS and Simsun. Both show up in the fonts folder, Arial with a Opentype icon and Simsun with a true type icon, both have a .ttf extension. Both fonts appear in Word but neither in ID.

Both were installed using Windows install fonts.

Many thanks
Alan

[P***@adobeforums.com]

Just to be sure, you've scrolled through the whole font list in ID, all the way to the bottom? Oriental fonts are in a section by themselves, and at the very bottom are fonts not recognized as fitting into the other categories.

Peter

[a***@adobeforums.com]

Ahh yes, you are right they are both at the bottom of the list, but when I apply them neither of them give me the Chinese characters I was expecting to get.

Alan

[P***@adobeforums.com]

Did you key in Chinese? Generally, if you don't have a Chinese input method you'll need to select from the Glyphs menu. This isn't a translation program. :)

You should check out the topic near the top regarding Asian language support: <http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bc0381a/7>

Peter

[J***@adobeforums.com]

If you've tried to paste Chinese characters into InDesign and all you get are question marks or pink boxes, make sure to sound off. I can't tell, from your post, whether you're expecting English to magically turn into Chinese when you apply Simsun, or if you're legitimately trying to set Chinese type in ID. If you are actually setting type, try placing your Chinese in other file formats; there's a handy "Import Options" button when placing a file, and the options for raw text files in particular will let you select which codepage your source file is in, and so on.

Or are you trying to key directly into Indy? What input method are you using? More details, please.

[a***@adobeforums.com]

Thanks for replying

I was sent a Word document of which a small part of it is to be in Chinese. The person who sent me the Word file gave me the two font names mentioned above to use for the Chinese characters. Yes, I was expecting to be able to change the English characters into Chinese, if this doesn't happen I'm sure of the purpose of having the foreign fonts?

The Chinese characters appear in the Word file, so what I have had to do is, convert the Word file into a pdf and then crop to leave only the Chinese characters, then import as a graphic, this has got me round the problem, far from an ideal situation though.

Many thanks
Alan

[J***@adobeforums.com]

Well, Alan, part of the problem is that a lot of people think that you can highlight English text, choose a Chinese font, and the English will be automagically translated into Chinese. This is not how it works, and machine translation (i.e., done by a computer, not a human being) is famously unreliable, anyways, except in a few circumstances. The point of having Chinese fonts is to display and print text in Chinese. There is a machine translation engine that is part of MS Word, if you have the Proofing Tools installed, that allows you to translate English text into Chinese.

DO NOT TRUST IT. Like Babelfish, it creates text that is sometimes barely comprehensible, but is often totally incorrect, and is sometimes misleading in very dangerous ways.

Do you not have any Chinese text in your Word file? Call a translation firm. Turn it over to a professional.

Do you already have Chinese text in your Word file? If so, respond to this message; I can give you some advice on how to get it into InDesign.

[a***@adobeforums.com]

Sorry for the delay in reply, yes I do have the Chinese text in the Word file.

I'm still not entirely clear as to what I should be getting when I hightlight the text and apply the Chinese font.

Many thanks
Alan

[D***@adobeforums.com]

It all depends on what the font has in those character positions. Many Asian fonts have a complete Roman character set in the normal character positions and so that's what you'll get -- the same characters but with the look built-into the Chinese font.

Dave

[P***@adobeforums.com]

Alan,

It's still not entirely clear, to me at least, if you are seeing Chinese characters in Word, although I think you are. Are those characters formatted with the font you want to use, and if not, what happens if you highlight them and change the font?

Peter

[J***@adobeforums.com]

Wow, this thread is confusing. I think I understand what's going on, though. So, I'm going to review what we've established thus far, and if I get it incorrect at any point, Alan, please do let us know.

1) You put the text from your Word file into InDesign, either by copying & pasting or via File -> Place.

2) The place(s) in the text that are supposed to be in Chinese are not in Chinese at this point; they're either a row of question marks, or a row of pink boxes. (It's possible that they're just the wrong Chinese characters, in which case see my advice about saving as Big5 or GB2312 below.)

3) You then apply either SimSun or Arial Unicode MS to these characters, but what you get after applying these fonts does not match what you have in your Word file. There are many possibilities here: you get Chinese characters that do not match the ones in your Word file, or you get question marks, or you get the right Chinese characters, but they're still marked pink, or something.

Did I get it right?

Here's a set of basic "how-to-get-Chinese-into-ID" instructions. If they don't work for you, please post with some more specific details (exactly what do you see when you apply SimSun to the putatively Chinese characters?), and some screenshots if possible.

First off, does your computer support Chinese text processing? Assuming you're running WinXP, go to Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Languages tab, and check the "Install files for East Asian languages" box.

Next: did you copy the text out of Word and paste it into ID? Don't. Use File -> Place.

That didn't work? Make a Word file with just the Chinese characters, and try placing that. Then apply SimSun to the Chinese characters.

Still no dice? Open up your Chinese-only Word file, do a File -> Save As, then choose "Raw Text" from the Type dropdown, then choose "Other Encodings" and choose "Unicode" or "Unicode (UTF-8 )." (I'm assuming you have Office XP or 2003.) Then, go back to InDesign, and use File -> Place, but check the "Import Options" box in the lower left hand corner, and choose the appropriate encoding from the dropdown (Unicode or UTF-8 ). Then apply SimSun to the Chinese characters.

Lastly, if even THAT doesn't work, try saving raw text files out of Word in Chinese ("Traditional, Big5" or "Simplified, GB2312"), and then placing those raw text files in ID and applying SimSun (or MingLiu, assuming that you've installed it in the first step).

If none of this works, you have big problems.

[a***@adobeforums.com]

Thanks for that explanation Joel,

When importing a Word document into ID I always convert to an ASCII format,.txt and place into ID. I have found with the Word file with the Chinese characters,converting to .txt obviously strips these characters out. If I place the Word file into ID still as a .doc it will import the Chinese characters, I then have to apply Simsun to the appropriate letters,this does slightly alter the spacing of the characters. If I import as a .txt and then apply Simsun it does not apply the Chinese character at all. This is not my preferred way of working but the end justifies the means I guess.

Thank you all for you support, if you think I am still doing something wrong in this exercise please let me know.

Alan

[a***@adobeforums.com]

Joel, I have now tried using Unicode at the point of converting to .txt, this works for the Chineses characters, but what I have omitted to say previously is that, also in the same document along with the Chinese characters I also have German in the form of Umlauts, these now get stripped out. Guess I'm onto a loser trying to retain both in a .txt file, both are retained in a .doc, but so is everything else, i.e. graphics and all the Word formatting I don't need.

Again many thanks
Alan

[J***@adobeforums.com]

Well, the whole point of Unicode is that you should be able to retain everything in a raw text file. ASCII only has support for English and a select group of Western European languages, which explains why your Chinese was dropping when you saved out an ASCII text file.

I'd imagine that your characters with umlauts were typed using combining characters, which InDesign does not support, which might explain them dropping when you place your Unicode text file. If you look at the Unicode text file in Notepad, do you lose your umlauts? (I'm just curious; I would write umlaut drops off to InDesign's lack of support for combining glyphs, but it's possible they're dropping at an earlier point.)

If I were in your shoes, the way I'd handle this would be to delete all the styles in the Word file, remove all the formatting, save out an RTF, open up that RTF in OpenOffice, check for unneeded formatting etc., and resave the RTF in OO, which is useful to strip out the MS nastiness that is inserted into the RTF.

[a***@adobeforums.com]

In Notepad, umlauts not stripped out but Chinese characteres are.

[J***@adobeforums.com]

This. Makes. No. Sense.

If you think that you might be doing other multilingual work in the future and want to continue this conversation, send me some email. It seems likely that you have some OS configuration to do, if a Unicode text file won't reliably display Unicode text files.