Multi-language print output
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- PonyBoy
I've been given pdf's in 12 different languages that supposedly all say the same thing...
That's the issue though - they're pdf's... If I copy / paste them into inDesign etc... ... loads of missing characters - not to mention I can't read the damn things to verify... AND... some are completely different character systems to begin with - chinese... arabic... japanese...
All I'm being asked to do is take the text and flow it into a branded template...
... I have no clue how to make this work... ... anyone run into this before? I'm not sure what to do here.
- e-pill0
can you open in Illustrator and copy paste from there?
would that make any differences?
- ayport0
Helvetica World font will help
- duckofrubber0
My head aches just thinking about this.
- SoulFly0
agree with ayport.
What you really need is an international font family installed on your side.
Gill Sans also has an international set, it even picks up the Chinese, etc, characters.Also try Lucida Grande, I think that worked once for me as well.
Keep in mind, copying from PDFs is tricky, even English sometimes doesn't do a perfect copy&paste from PDFs.
- e-pill0
can you get a copy of any branded templates that use multi language output and use it for references??
- PonyBoy-1
I went ahead and set up a template in microsoft word... just added some branded graphics to the background... then threw it back at the agency and told them to reflow the document w/the appropriate info (or have the client do it)...
... too much work... not worth the time - I wish there was an easier way to translate / set up these kind of multi-language deals w/out such headache
- acescence0
i had to reflow a bunch of multi-byte docs and ran into the issue of illy wanting to outline the missing fonts. I just opened them all in preview and did a copy/paste to illy and everything automagically remapped to an available font. multi-byte font support is one thing os x gets right.
- < preview does do a better job of this than acrobat in my experience.Amicus
- Gnash0
If you have Acrobat Pro:
From "Advanced" in the top menu select > Document Processing, then > Batch Processing, then select "Save All As RTF" in the right window of the box that appears and click the "Run Sequence" button.This does a pretty good job of extracting the text - depending on the layout. It won't solve the problem of the Chinese characters though.
- Amicus0
The other problem you'll run into is Left-to-right vs right-to-left. Hebrew and Arabic will tend to reverse themselves after pasting even if you find a font with the same character encoding. This is a problem as some characters have different forms at the beginning, middle or end of words.
There are scripts around to reverse the text automatically, but they don't tend to fix the beginning and final character problems.
Asian fonts often run Top-to-bottom and right-to-left so you have to watch those as well.