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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Inserting Greek text into InDesign/Quark

monkeyoverthehill - Oct 23, 2006 - 5:46 am

OK. Im beaten!

Im trying to set some artwork, initailly in English. They now want it in Greek. The scenario being, they (translator) will send me a Microsoft Word Document, holding the Greek translation.

From copying the text from word into Quark, and seeing alot of spaces and 'what the hell is that' kinda thing. I moved to InDesign. Altough slightly better, not 100%. I downloaded a Greek font, and found i was getting there. Glyphs were showing i had most of the alphabet, but not everything, so where the odd character was meant to be inserted, a default character appeared.

I ventured into the Uni-code thing. this is where i started losing it. Im missing a few characters that are not featured. Ive been hearing about Greek Keys, Extended Greek Characters, ISO/IEC 10646, Modern Greek/Ancient Greek and changing System Preferences - Input Menu - Character Palette etc. ALL GREEK TO ME.

Can anyone offer a simple, easy to follow, step by step guide to getting greek into quark or inDesign, then it being successfully made into a pdf?

Im working Quark 6.5, InDesign CS1, Microsoft Office, OSX 10.3.9.

cavaughan - Oct 24, 2006 - 4:03 am

I remember a similar issue a long time ago. The problem came basically down to this, as I recall (can't find it in these forums, but it's there somewhere). OSX uses a particular method for displaying fonts. But some programs (like Office X) use their engine. This is why you can see, say Greek in Mail, Text and other OSX common applications, but not in specialized ones that use their own engines. I was suspicious the Quark is probably one of the culprits that uses their own engine and then I found this on the Internet.

Quark XPress

Quark XPress is the undisputed king of page layout programs (despite Adobe InDesign’s strong showing in this area), and real Unicode support in Quark would mark a major turning point in Unicode acceptance. Unfortunately it seems that the recent release of Quark XPress 6.0 has not introduced Unicode or OpenType support to Quark XPress. This is disappointing, but also consistent with Quark’s requirement that users purchase separate language versions of the software to handle various scripts. Aside from the fact that failure to really support Unicode or OpenType hampers multilingual work in Quark, it also means that Quark cannot take advantage of the advanced typographical capabilities afforded by OpenType.


So, in other words, you can't get the Greek to show up unless you by a Greek-enabled, let's say, version of Quark. I wonder if there is some other program you could use to finalize whatever your doing just to put the Greek text in. Like, I wonder if Acrobat 7 might be able to do it.

monkeyoverthehill - Oct 24, 2006 - 4:12 am

Thank you very much for that. You have reassured me of my initial thinking. Im now going down the route of sending it out to someone whos know how to finalise the whole thing for pre-press.

Thank you once again.

monkey

monkeyoverthehill - Oct 24, 2006 - 11:18 pm

If you read this, ive found a way around it. May help if anyone else asks. using inDesign. Use the font Minion Pro. It can accept all 234 characters in greek, and can be inserted from word. works absolutely fine, prints and makes pdfs.

cheers