Forward/backward glitches in ID CS5.5?

[rebekahy85107360]

Hi all,

I'm fairly new to InDesign, but I've been able to solve most of my problems by perusing the forums. However, I am encountering two problems on my InDesign CS5.5. I work at a newspaper, so these questions are definitely important for me to find answers to!

- One, oftentimes (not EVERY time), when I am typing in a text box, the punctuation goes to the beginning of the sentence. I cannot find where in 5.5 to change my settings and I do not know how the prior person who had this computer set it up. Any advice??

- Two, if I am creating a text box on the side (for example, to create a story jump), if I copy and paste that text box to the jump page, it's fine UNTIL I try to set it to multiple columns. Once I create multiple columns, it flips my text so that the end of the story is in the first column and where the jump should pick up is on the opposite side of the page.

I am assuming there is a language setting that's wrong somewhere. But I've spent way too much time trying to figure out the answers to these problems! This is on a Mac.

Thanks!

[Joel Cherney]

Either you have a Middle East edition of InDesign installed, or something is very wrong. The behavior you're seeing is what you'd see if you had the ME version installed, with typical Arabic defaults. Tell me: if you go to InDesign -> Preferences, do you see a "Right-to-Left" category? If so, you have the ME edition installed, but we can help you set your generic preferences to exhibit left-to-right behavior.

If not, have you tried replacing your preferences?

[BobLevine]

Could also be that world ready composer is enabled.

[rebekahy85107360]

World ready composer is not enabled; I did Google it and found out how to check, and it's not.

[rebekahy85107360]

No, I do not have a "right to left" option under Preferences. I don't think this is the ME version. It's a local newspaper and they purchased InDesign for the previous editor. I have not tried replacing my preferences, but I can try when I'm not in the middle of working on special section... Just noticed it again, when I placed text onto a page, that the end parenthesis goes to the beginning of the line. This only happens when I place text, not if I copy and paste it.

How do you check the world ready composer? I will search for it... but I'm just at a loss. I don't know what is up with this version of ID.

[rebekahy85107360]

OK, I did discover something: When I place or copy text, over in "Paragraph Styles," if it's set to "Normal," the punctuation will go to the beginning of the sentence if it's the last sentence in a paragraph, etc. BUT, if I select all the text and choose "Body Copy" from the list, it orients itself correctly.

At least it gives me a way to get around it, but "Normal" is the default setting, apparently, and it pulls all text in that way..

[Joel Cherney]

Actually, Normal is the default paragraph style in Microsoft Word. InDesign's default paragraph style is called [Basic Paragraph]. At some point, you placed or copy/pasted some text set with the Normal style set to right-to-left from within Word. It shouldn't be hard to make a Normal style in Word with left-to-right paragraph behavior, and import it into InDesign. Or, better yet, you could use styles within InDesign, and make a new style from the ground up, not based on your current Normal style, and give it a new name (NewNormal? ) and then delete the Normal style, replacing it with your new style.

There are actually dozens of ways to work with styles here, and if you tell us more about your typical workflow then I am sure that we can make some suggestions for you. But if you open up your Paragraph Styles panel and double-click on the Normal style, then I am pretty sure you will see something like "Paragraph Direction: Right-to-Left" in the list of features of that style. (Or if you mouse over the style, maybe you'll see a mouseover popup with an RTL override; it's hard to say without actually examining the file.)

[rebekahy85107360]

The prior editor at the newspaper must have set it somehow. "Normal," when I click on it, does not say anything about Paragraph Direction: RIght-to-Left. It does say the language is set to "English:USA" in those options.

Today, when I opened up ID to work on next week's newspaper, "Normal" is not even an OPTION anymore under Paragraph Styles. However, no matter what I do, if I select a text box from page 1 that's the copy that will jump to page 2, and paste the text box, it looks fine until I try to create columns. When I try to make it a six-column story, it flips the text so the first sentence in the jump is STILL supposed to be at the end of the story.

I know there are ways to flow pages in ID; however, I have to work on each page individually because that's how I have to send them to the graphic designer. Like I said, I can always drag a saved item from the library and manually jump it, but it's just bizarre how I've managed to fix everything but this. Pasting a text box onto a page and creating columns is basically turning my story around so the columns read right to left.

I've been messing with it for several days. Does this help anyone figure out what is going on over here?

Thanks!

[Joel Cherney]

Today, when I opened up ID to work on next week's newspaper, "Normal" is not even an OPTION anymore under Paragraph Styles. However, no matter what I do, if I select a text box from page 1 that's the copy that will jump to page 2, and paste the text box, it looks fine until I try to create columns. When I try to make it a six-column story, it flips the text so the first sentence in the jump is STILL supposed to be at the end of the story.

I can think of two ways to approach this. One of which is: that we can assume that your preferences have been damaged in some way, and the hidden-under-the-hood-in-your-North-American-Indesign setting for story direction has been flipped accidentally to right-to-left story as default. If so, then replacing your preferences would fix the problem (and undo any user interface customization you might have done). Instructions for replacing your prefs can be found here.

Or, alternately, we could assume that your prefs are fine, and that your settings have accidentally inherited some right-to-left stuff from something imported from Word. In that case, the thing to do would be to make a new document with no text or objects, but with all of the styles you typically use, and then save that INDD and share it somewhere public (like, say, Dropbox) where we can download it and open it up on our own time and poke around. For what it's worth, I don't think that there is a setting for story direction in the paragraph style. I think I can write a script that will reset your default story direction to left-to-right, but that would only reset one story to be an LTR story, not every new story you're going to make. I am going to go nose around in application.storyPreferences to see how hard it is to reset that preference via script.

[Laubender]

Hi Joel,

the three cases done with ExtendScript (JavaScript) :

// Application preference:
app.storyPreferences.
storyDirection = StoryDirectionOptions.LEFT_TO_RIGHT_DIRECTION;

// Preference of the active document:
app.documents[0].storyPreferences.
storyDirection = StoryDirectionOptions.LEFT_TO_RIGHT_DIRECTION;

// Story of selected text or selected text frame:
app.selection[0].parentStory.storyPreferences.
storyDirection = StoryDirectionOptions.LEFT_TO_RIGHT_DIRECTION;

Regards,
Uwe