Characters appear in wrong place in Indesign table header

[alexs3347765]

I'm currently working on a table in Indesign, this one is a little hard to explain, so bear with me. When I click the mouse at the end of the text the line cursor will appear and start to flash as expected. But when I type in a symbol, for example, a closed bracket, it appears at the end of the text instead of where the cursor is at the beginning of the text. I've noticed this only happens when typing a symbol, not a letter.

So the heading text I'm trying type is: Price (pp)

What's happening instead is this: (Price (pp

The bracket seems to appear at the start of the text instead of at the end (and also the wrong way round)

This is also happening with the following text, I want to type this:

Price

- Vat

But it types this instead:

Price
Vat -

So in this instance it appears at the end of the line instead of at the beginning.

The other strange thing is that it's only happening in a few of the cells, not all of them.

I've never encountered this before, what's going on?

[Creamer Training]

What version of ID and OS?

What happens if you use a different font in the table?

[alexs3347765]

Indesign CC 2017.0 Release 12.0.0.81 x64 Build

Windows 10 Pro

Same thing happens regardless of font.

[Barb Binder]

Hi Alex:

What App Language are you using? Open your Creative Cloud desktop app > click the three dots in top right corner > Preferences > Creative Cloud > Apps:

If that's not the issue, and it's not the font as per Dave, have you tried deleting preferences? Three options, outlined in the two posts below:

Troubleshooting 101: Replace, or "trash" your InDesign preferences [Locked]

CC 2018 InDesign—Don't Import previous settings and preferences

~Barb

[alexs3347765]

App Language is set to English (UK)

I have deleted preferences. This has not fixed the issue unfortunately.

[Laubender · Accepted solution]

Hi Alex,

did you set up the table yourself?
Or did you copy it from a different source?

I'm asking, because the issue you are facing is looking like a problem with character direction set to Right-To-Left.

What is the used paragraph composer of your paragraph style? Are there any GREP Styles in place?

Regards,
Uwe

[alexs3347765]

Hi,

Yes I copied the table from another document I created as I wanted to keep the design of the table consistent.

There are no GREP Styles in place but I am working on a version of a document that has been copied multiple times with different iterations. There are old paragraph styles in there that no longer apply to the current version I'm working on. None of the text I'm working on has a paragraph style or character style applied to it.

How do I check the character direction?

Thanks

[alexs3347765]

I believe I've fixed it!

It seems to be an issue with the paragraph style. It had a default [basic paragraph +] applied to it. I changed it to none and manually changed the type settings back to what it was (font, size, colour etc). Seems to be working fine now.

Serves me right for not cleaning up the document before working on it. Although I'm still unsure what setting in the style made the text behave in that way.

Thanks for the help.

[Laubender]

Hi Alex,

if you still have the old version you could look up the formatting of the paragraph in the Paragraph Panel.

Also look up the applied character style or any character formatting. My bet is on wrong character direction.

Regards,
Uwe

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

Serves me right for not cleaning up the document before working on it.

That's a very important less to learn!

We've found that especially with documents that have been reused for several years by many different people, there's all sorts of crud in there that fowls up your new version. Especially troublesome when you're working on accessible PDFs and EPUBs.

It sure would be nice to have the option of pasting without the formatting (just the content, please!) or with the formatting.

We often copy content from an InDesign document, but paste it into Word first, scrub it clean, and then recopy the cleaned version into InDesign. The table structure can be retained throughout this by right-clicking in Word before you paste it there and selecting the correct method of paste (with formatting, without, with tables, etc.).

That would be a very nice feature to have in InDesign!