SimSun in Adobe Indesign

[Salvatore_Ilardi@adobeforums.com]

I am using Adobe InDesign 1.5. I received a Microsoft Word document which I opened in MS Word 2002. The Microsoft Word document contains text in SimSun. I wanted to copy and paste the SimSun word document into Adobe InDesign, but when I do that, I receive only question marks where the chinese characters should be. What step am I missing?

Thank you.

[Kalavinka@adobeforums.com]

Salvatore,

The trouble could well be in your old version of ID. I use 3.x (CS)and have no trouble using SimSun on a daily basis (although I tend to prefer "placing" the file). It works every time for me. If you want to see quite a few examples of same with both the English and the Chinese in the same PDF ebooks, you can see at [url]www.kalavinka.org[/url].

Another problem with older versions of ID and Chinese is that, even when you can get them to work together (as I did with 2.x), ID won't handle the Chinese punctuation correctly and so will start lines of Chinese with "periods." Anybody who knows any Chinese knows this is totally unacceptable. Manual correction of the problem is a complete pain and not at all worth the time. This problem was completely fixed in the latest CS version. So, yes, it's a drag, but if you want to deal with Chinese in Indesign, best bite the bullet and cough up the $175 or whatever for the upgrade.

Have fun.

Dharmamitra
Kalavinka Press

[joeylee3]

The step you have missed, just before you paste or import the document onto the Indesign page, go to the character palette choose the "SimSun" type then do the action which would fixing the question marks all over your page.

[Thomas_Phinney@adobeforums.com]

Also, maybe try after pasting selecting the text and changing the font back to SimSun.

Regards,

T

[Kalavinka@adobeforums.com]

Of course none of this helps with the fact that ID 1.5 won't do Chinese punctuation in an acceptable way. But, if it's a one-shot deal, you can drop in "spaces" at the end of preceding lines to push the periods off the front of the following line. Kind of ugly, but it's a work-around if you don't care about pretty.

Mitra

[David_W._Goodrich@adobeforums.com]

ID 3's handling of CJK punctuation is a great improvement over ID 2, where one needed to use the "No Break" command to make sure punctuation stuck with the preceding character. I often define a "NoBreak" character style, for applying that single attribute, but I usually save it for widow-and-orphan control, and besides, I like to put Chinese in its own character style.

David