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leon verde
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Hebrew text placement missing characters

Dec 10, 2012 8:11 PM

When placing text into ID CS6 (8.0) from an RTF file created in Davka Writer 7, I get a lot of pink boxes, all vowels AFAICS. This happens whether I use the ME version or InTools, and on both Windows and Mac. Anyone else had to deal with this?

406 Views   5 Replies   Latest reply: leon verde, Dec 11, 2012 9:20 PM
 
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  • Dov Isaacs
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    1. Dov Isaacs,
    Dec 10, 2012 9:19 PM   in reply to leon verde
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    DavkaWriter is somewhat of a strange beast in terms of its character set, which if memory serves me correctly, is not fully compliant with Unicode which InDesign is based upon, although their RTF export should be doing a conversion to Unicode since Word also uses Unicode.

     

    Another possibility is that the Hebrew font that you are using in your InDesign document simply doesn't have the nikkud glyphs or has them mapped someplace other than where one would expect them to be.

     

    Bottom line, it would appear to be a character code or glyph mapping problem or a missing glyph problem.

     

              - Dov

     
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  • Dov Isaacs
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    2. Dov Isaacs,
    Dec 10, 2012 9:20 PM   in reply to leon verde
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    DavkaWriter is somewhat of a strange beast in terms of its character set, which if memory serves me correctly, is not fully compliant with Unicode which InDesign is based upon, although their RTF export should be doing a conversion to Unicode since Word also uses Unicode.

     

    Another possibility is that the Hebrew font that you are using in your InDesign document simply doesn't have the nikkud glyphs or has them mapped someplace other than where one would expect them to be.

     

    Bottom line, it would appear to be a character code or glyph mapping problem or a missing glyph problem.

     

              - Dov

     
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  • leon verde
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    3. leon verde,
    Dec 11, 2012 8:16 PM   in reply to Dov Isaacs
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    I think you are exactly right that it is a mapping problem, but it's a puzzling one. The RTF generated by Davka Writer shows up perfectly in Word (on Windows--the Mac has its own problems which I'll leave aside for now). So all the glyphs, including the nikud, are there and are found and correctly displayed by Word.

     

    When the file is placed into an ID document, however, many of the nikud are missing. I have been searching for a work-around with no success so far. Is there some setting in InDesign ME that handles the way text is handled under the "place" command?

     

    We have a 500 page book to lay out, and really don't want to re-type all the Hebrew text, of which there is a lot!

     

    --Leon

     
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  • Dov Isaacs
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    4. Dov Isaacs,
    Dec 11, 2012 8:43 PM   in reply to leon verde
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    Try one extra step. Open the RTF in Microsoft Word on Windows and then resave the file as RTF and bring that into InDesign, or try copying and pasting from Word into InDesign.

     

              - Dov

     
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  • leon verde
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    5. leon verde,
    Dec 11, 2012 9:20 PM   in reply to Dov Isaacs
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    Dov--

    Wow, that seems to do it. I'll have to fool around with it some more to

    make sure, but I get a sense of what's going on. There seem to be a number

    of Hebrew fonts with similar names but different encodings, some with nikud

    and some without, and apparently Word can somehow tell which one will work

    best and does a substitution.

     

    Many thanks for your help. It looks as though this is going to work, so we

    will probably upgrade from the trial ID ME version (we already use the US

    CS6 ID for books that don't have much Hebrew in them).

    I'll post this to the forum when I get a chance.

     

    Bill Donahue

    Green Lion Press

     
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