InDesign in the Middle East
Multilingual publishing and cross-cultural design
The Middle East region is home to over 370 million people in 17 countries. It’s the arid land of palm trees, camels, and dunes. The land of the Bible. The birthplace of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. And the home of many enthusiastic InDesign users. I have been a designer for over 30 years. As a kid in Israel I was always into art, and I became a showing artist as a painter, printmaker, and handmade paper artist in New York. In the ’80s, I moved into computers for electronic art, and then into graphic design. Nowadays, I return to Israel at least twice a year and meet Israeli designers, artists, and creators. The design community there is expanding rapidly, and I’ve seen emerging talent from Israel and the Arab countries using InDesign, exploring the new features, and tailoring its capabilities to their own needs and unique design ideas, while figuring out the use of Middle Eastern fonts in a software that was first designed for the English language.
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Hello , I live in middle east and I have problem with typing. As you know we type from right to left and we should put dots after the text . Although i tried several times i have problem with dots before the text not after them. Thank you for helping me .
nj: It sounds as though your paragraph direction is not set properly. If you are using the normal English version of InDesign, you may need WorldTools (from in-tools.com) to get the paragraph, page, and text direction features enabled. Or, you can install the ME (middle-east version), which has all the direction features).
nj: I am also living in Middle East and using Adobe CC products. Most of the time I used InDesign but never face the problem with typing. Things works fine.
Regards
Hi.
I use Indesign CC Middle East Version. I have many preset elements stored in the CC libraries, some in English and some in Arabic.
When I place an English pre-set element from the CC Library it always places it’s alignment on the right and if there are numbers they get placed in Arabic (technically Hindi) instead of Roman (1234567890 which is technically Arabic so try not be confused)
I have not done a good job explaining my problem, but hopefully it’ll make sense to someone