Comments on: Search for Foreign Language Characters in Text

By: David Finkelstein

David Finkelstein — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 17:38:13 +0000

Boy, was this helpful.

Building on Peter’s suggestion, I tried expanding the range to include punctuation characters as the Japanese period, comma, ellipsis, and brackets.

[\x{4E00}-\x{9FBF}\x{3000}-\x{30FF}]+

By: rue d'annemasse plan

rue d'annemasse plan — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 08:15:11 +0000

Thanks for talking about that, I feel strongly about it and love learning more on this topic. If possible, as you gain expertise, would you mind updating your blog with more information? It is extremely helpful for me.

By: Andie

Andie — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 12:36:57 +0000

I have tried it but it still complicated for me though…
Any other way?

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 17:36:09 +0000

@Lemonshrew: Are these files exported from Scribe as rtf or something? Perhaps it’s an encoding problem. (I have no experience with that. This might be a good thing to ask in the forums. Click Forums in the nav bar above.)

By: Lemonshrew

Lemonshrew — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 17:23:46 +0000

Does anyone here have any experience importing text files that have been tagged using Scribe? All my quote marks are coming in as “ (that’s ampersand number sign 8220).

I’m just wondering if it’s a problem with the coding of the file, or if it’s an InDesign setting, or what.

By: Harbs

Harbs — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:48:25 +0000

Great post David! I just wanted to point out that Multilingual Tools as well as World Tools have what I call "Language Styles" which can apply styles based on writing scripts. Besides working in CS2, the extra trick that Language Styles does is that it applies the character styles to punctuation between that language as well (using a trick that I learned from Peter Kahrel quite some time ago). It currently has Hebrew and Latin (Roman) styles. I expected to add many more (Arabic, Cryllic, Indic, CJK, etc), but I have yet to receive any requests to do so!

By: Jongware

Jongware — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:59:08 +0000

@Mayoor:
“inadvertently i have activated some secret keyboard short-cut for foreign (accented) characters..”

Yes — the one on your system, not a hidden feature of InDesign

If you are using Windows, you might have pressed and released Ctrl+Left Alt (from memory) — it toggles the international keyboard def. Go to your Control Panel, Regional & Language settings, tab Languages, button “Details”, tab Settings, and finally button Key Settings.
Oh, and then hit the button “Change Key Sequence”. Disable both options, if you aren’t using them consciously.

And that was not typed off the top of my head. I s’pose the equivalent on OS X would be a bit easier.

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:39:28 +0000

@Mayoor: I’m not sure what the problem was that you are describing. InDesign should handle those characters just fine. Of course, there are some characters that do not exist inside fonts.

By: Mayoor

Mayoor — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:37:08 +0000

I encountered a problem recently in CS4, wherein on typing ‘(apostrophe) or “, accented O – e.g O with a tilde used to be inserted in text.
Is this a problem of text variables or inadvertently i have activated some secret keyboard short-cut for foreign (accented) characters

By: Laurent Tournier

Laurent Tournier — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:59:04 +0000

Hello,

About [a-zA-Z], it is right with both OS and InDesign CS4. But, it isn’t with Mac OS X and InDesign CS3.

As I recently wrote on my blog, [a-z] matches accented characters in Latin-1, Latin-A, Latin-B or Latin add.

Best