InDesign Help

Unicode fonts are not supported in InDesign. Any language that reads right to left will not work properly in InDesign. If you place it from a text editor that does support Hebrew it will then be reversed and read left to right. For native support of Hebrew you will need InDesign 5 ME (Middle Eastern) which is available from Winsoft. While that is certainly the best method for Hebrew support it also cost money and you won’t be able to have both the ME version and the Universal English (standard) version on your machine at the same time. If you need both versions you will have to have the CS2 version of one and the CS3 version of the other.

If you don’t want to buy the ME version of InDesign here are some not-as-good but free solutions.

1. If you will only be using Hebrew for a short period of time then the InDesign ME trial may be right for you. You can use it for 30 days and it’s completely free. You do have to sign up for an account at Winsoft but that basically consists of giving them an e-mail address. I did it myself and it took less than a minute.
2. If your only using a few words of Hebrew then you can just type words backward to get the desired result.
3. Run a Script. I ran across this on the Adobe forums, posted by Harbs at Print Israel. It’s best used for small amounts of text as reversing text can cause problems when using it on multiple lines. myText = app.selection[0].contents.split(”")
   if(myText[myText.length-1]==”\r” || myText[myText.length-1]==”\n”){
   myEnd = myText.pop();
   }else{
   myEnd = “”;
   }
   myText.reverse(”")
   myText = myText.join(”");
   app.selection[0].contents = myText + myEnd;

   If you’re unfamiliar with scripting I’ve explained it step by step in a previous post on how to use scripts in InDesign.

4. If you have lots of Hebrew you need to set, have a project that will last over 30 days and you don’t wish to buy the ME version of InDesign then you’re stuck with one option; Saving your text as graphic file and placing that in InDesign. You won’t have the ability to easily edit this but at least it’s an option.

I hope this helps and as always, happy InDesigning.

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