Indesign & Chinese

[Ruth_Shaw@adobeforums.com]

I too am just inputing Simsun into In Design for the first time. The problem was mentioned of punctuation wrapping to the beginning of a line, and CS not doing this. I am not sure what is meant by CS. Could you explain a little further please?

You answered already a question I had about bolding Simsun, thank you. What about italics? Is there a Simsun italics equivalent?

Many thanks to anyone who is able to help! Ruth

[Kalavinka@adobeforums.com]

Ruth,
CS refers to "Creative Suite" the latest version of InDesign. If you have to do much Chinese layout, you basically have no choice. ID 2x will drive you nuts by parking Chinese periods at the beginning of each line. Then you'll try to fix it with expenditure of much labor and it will still look horrible.

I never use italicized characters, only standard and bold. If you want italic Chinese, you're probably going to have to lay out some dough with no sure guarantee that the fonts will actually be all that compatible for use with ID (there have been a few hysterical posts trying to blame ID for bad Chinese fonts). This could be especially problematic if you try to mix the italic font from a third party (which may or may not be Unicode compatible) with the MS SimSun & SimHei which _are_ Unicode compatible.

Italic fonts usable under ID are surely out there, probably in abundance. I just don't use them so would be a fountain of misinformation. Maybe go stare at the TwinBridge site for starters. If I recall, they may have font families for sale. Also: Try Googling and then roll the dice on the search results.

Good luck,
Dharmamitra,
Kalavinka Press