Optimize Your Indesign File Ebook

19 TIPS

TO OPTIMIZE YOUR INDESIGN FILE FOR TRANSLATION

A short guide for InDesign users

CONTENTS WHAT’S IN THE EBOOK? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 WHAT IS REDOKUN? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 ADVANTAGES YOU GET WITH REDOKUN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 19 TIPS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR INDESIGN FILE FOR TRANSLATION . . 5

Initial file set up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1. Useful concepts about Translation Memories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 2. Check the hidden characters setting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

What you should do before sending the file to translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 10. Check the orthography (InDesign Dynamic Spelling) . . . . . . . . 18 11. Pay attention to text inside images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 12. Set your frame to resize with your text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 13. Use column breaks and keep options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 14. Consider Splitting Up Threaded Stories into Separate Frames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 15. Give them a reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

3. Try to avoid inline styles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

What you should do when your file is translated . . . . . . . . 23

4. Use character styles and paragraph styles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

16. Change the language attribute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

5. Choose a font with all the Glyphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

17. Fix text-boxes size, if necessary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

6. Set the language attribute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

18. Check that all the glyphs are visualized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

7. Use paragraph indent instead of spaces and tabulations. . . . 14

19. Create a document with the languages in sequence using a Book file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

8. Use bulleted lists and numbered lists properly . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 9. Wrap your text with soft-returns rather than hard-returns . . . 16

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Bonus: Copy an entire layer from an InDesign file to another [Script] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

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WHAT’S IN THE EBOOK?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

This guide will give you an exhaustive look into the issue of creating an InDesign document ready for translation.

•

What rules should we follow while designing the document? A few precautions taken while designing the file might save us a lot of time and improve the overall translation experience.

Stefano Bernardi has worked on numerous mid to large–sized InDesign projects for Alstom, DeLonghi,

•

What steps should we take right before sending the file to

Philips, and many others before starting Redokun in

translation?

2015. Realizing that working on multilingual projects

A few adjustments that you should really consider right before

was really hard work, Stefano decided that something

sending the file to the translator in order to avoid or limit post-

was needed to make the designers’ life easier.

translation edits.

As Redokun’s Co-Founder, Stefano spends most of his time helping customers to optimize their InDesign

•

What should we do when we receive the translated text?

work-flow.

A few checks and last adjustments should be applied to ensure

From time to time he writes for InDesignSecrets and

that your new language is correctly visualized.

InDesign Magazine. He also holds in-house InDesign courses for companies in the Venice, Italy area.

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Get in touch with him at: [email protected]

WHAT IS REDOKUN?

ADVANTAGES YOU GET WITH REDOKUN

Redokun is a tool that:

•

Are you familiar with endless hours of copying and pasting?

• helps InDesign users work less and

Redokun extracts all the text inside an InDesign file and lets you export an

faster on their multilingual projects

Excel file that you can send to your trusted translator. You can also invite the

• helps designers to stop wasting their

translators to work with Redokun’s integrated translation tool (Web Editor).

time on repetitive tasks such as copy-

•

Do you struggle with keeping documents’ styles and text formatting while adding a new language?

paste operations • helps to integrate translators and co-

Redokun allows you to change all the text inside a document while

workers in the designer’s work-flow

keeping all the styles of the original file. Using the simple concept of tags and markers, it enables designers to build a unified workflow with the

Redokun is the tool you can use with co-workers, sales partners, freelance

translators involved in the project. •

translators, and translation agencies to get your InDesign files translated.

Are you often wondering about the status of the translation? Assign translations and keep tabs on any job you are doing.

•

Last minute changes, product updates, new layout on a multilingual project? Make document revisions in seconds. Edit only the master document and let Redokun apply the changes to all the languages.

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19 TIPS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR INDESIGN FILE FOR TRANSLATION Adobe InDesign is a great piece of software. Powerful, reliable, and easy to use once you understand how it works and what it can do. However, if you have dealt with InDesign files that had to be translated into many languages, as I did, you’ll most likely have struggled with at least one of these issues:

• Spending hours just copying and pasting from InDesign to Word and vice-versa • Preserving styles and layout during the translation • Being sure that everything is translated (also text inside images) • Keeping each language updated when there is any content change

In the following pages, you’ll find a few suggestions on how to improve the design of your documents with the goal of making them translation-friendly while also being able to leverage the power of the tools integrated within InDesign.

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Initial file set up

More precision to you means

The more precise you are, the less time you’ll waste later and the better the

%% Better design

result will be. With ‘result’ I mean both: •

the translated document in output

•

and the Translation Memories correlated to your document.

%% Less time spent working on the file %% Improving the overall translation experience

Translation Memories might be a new concept for some. Often translators use tools to assist their job (technically Computer-assisted translation tools - the short form is CAT tools). One of the biggest advantages you have using these tools is that they store the translation pairs for later reuse (Translation Memories). That helps translators to speed up the translation of your files (because they won’t need to translate one same sentence more than once) and to keep consistency throughout the document and each document you will translate in the future. From a designer’s point of view, more copy consistency means fewer edits to be made after the process is finished.

For Redokun users If you use these tips, Redokun will generate a translated document that will require few edits or no edits at all. Also, the implementation of updates and general file revisions in all the target languages will be instant.

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1. Useful concepts about Translation Memories

Advantages you get with cleaner TMs

So, how does your InDesign file affect the translator’s TMs?

%% Shortest time of translation

Well, since TMs are basically a database of translation pairs, when the TMs are created, the TMs will contain the source text segment that will be used to match other occurrences of the same text within the document or in other

%% Lower translation costs %% More consistency in you translations

documents. So, as you can imagine, if the source language text is ‘dirty’ and contains control characters or is badly truncated, the translation tool will struggle to match the TM record later and the translator will not use that record. This results in a longer time for the translator to do his or her job and it will also increase her/his bill.

For Redokun users Redokun uses TMs to cut production times in two ways: • to suggest past translations that can be used again • to automatically pre-translate content that you have already translated in other documents

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2. Check the hidden characters setting When you are going to replace one text with a text in a different language, you want the general layout of your new file to be identical to the source document. In order to achieve that with few edits (or no edits at all) and avoiding mistakes, you should have complete control over your document’s text and spot any control character that you missed or that you might not want to use (More on this later).

InDesign uses special characters that are invisible to the eye and the printed version of your document. These characters are called control characters. They are used, for example, to wrap lines, break paragraphs, space words in a specific way, etc. While creating or editing your file you want to see them, and have control over them. To do so you should check the hidden characters setting by selecting Type > Show Hidden Characters.

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3. Try to avoid inline styles It’s important to get the document styles right before starting the translation (More on this later).

Disadvantages of using inline styles

Inline styles are great when you have to apply the properties of a single element. But as the number of elements inside the file grows, you might end up applying many properties each time for each element or using the Gradient Swatch tool to copy the style from an element to another. This is

&& Time consuming when you have more elements with the same style && Style edits have to be made manually for each element

quite time-consuming, and if you are going to replace your entire text or part of it with a new language it might turn into a very stressful and very

&& Low precision

imprecise exercise.

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4. Use character styles and paragraph styles InDesign offers a super effective system of styles: Character styles and Paragraph styles that you can use to apply specific properties to the text in a single step. A character style is a set of formatting character attributes (font family, font style, dimension, language, etc). While a paragraph style includes both character and paragraph formatting attributes (Indent, spacing, tabulations, etc).

You have two separate panels in InDesign where you can set character and paragraph styles.

If you don’t generally use them, start using them now! Using them properly will give you complete control over any file you prepare, and with time you’ll get way faster at creating your drafts and documents in InDesign. See more about character and paragraph styles here: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/paragraph-character-styles.html.

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Besides, if you are using a piece of software to translate your document, it will keep the styles structure unaltered. And remember; languages such as German and English differ more than 30% in length. So, if you translate from a language like English to a more bulky one like German, you might want to change the font size of your translated version in order to accommodate that

Advantages you get with using Character and Paragraph Styles correctly %% More control over the file and its design

difference. With proper styles you’ll be able to do that in a few seconds.

%% Less time editing and adapting the file to content in a new language

Paragraph styles can also be helpful when the Fonts you use don’t have all

%% Easy change of font in case of missing glyphs

the glyphs in the translated language. When a font is missing a specific glyph InDesign replaces it with a red square inside your document’s text where the glyph is missing. So, if your font doesn’t contain a letter with a specific accent, InDesign will replace that letter with a red square in the entire document, and that glyph won’t be visible in your text. To fix that you will

What is a glyph?

need to replace your font and with a style that is instant.

A glyph is a specific form of a character. For example, usually, in a font, the capital

If you use Paragraph and Character styles you will make your translator’s

letter A is available in several forms, such as

life way easier because the information into the document will be better

capitalized, small cap, with an accent, etc.

structured and cleaner then using inline styles.

Each of these versions is a glyph.

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5. Choose a font with all the Glyphs Every language might contain a huge array of different Glyphs. So how do we find the fonts that contain all the characters we need? Sadly InDesign has no integrated feature that can help us to search for a particular glyph. You can only visualize all the glyphs contained in a specific font (see picture 1).

A helpful tool to choose the right font before starting a project is the Wikipedia page about Unicode fonts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_font. There you can find a table that lists which fonts contain the Glyphs you need. Unfortunately, that table only contains some of the most used fonts.

So, what if you want to use a different font from the ones specified in that table? To check if a specific Glyph is contained in the font of your choice, or to see which fonts contain specific Glyphs, you can try the procedure described here: http://indesignsecrets.com/find-font-glyph.php.

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6. Set the language attribute Language is a character-level attribute used for both spelling and hyphenation rules. Being a character attribute allows you to assign a language to specific words so you can assign the right dictionary to words in “foreign” languages.

Any time you work with InDesign you should set the right language to your paragraph styles, that way you make sure that hyphenation rules are applied to your text and InDesign will help you to check the spelling (More on this later).

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7. Use paragraph indent instead of spaces and tabulations. Using several spaces and tabulations to align the text might create issues for you and the translators. Keep in mind that CAT tools sometimes strips nonvisible characters like spaces and tabulations, so if you’re abusing them, you might find yourself doing a lot of work in order to re-indent the text after the translation is done. This practice also creates incorrect segmentation and is hard for the translator to replicate in the translation.

Why indentation with spaces and tabulations is bad for your translation && It creates bad segmentation - so it’s harder or not possible to translate && Bad segmentation doesn’t allow to leverage any TMs && The output result might be totally different from the original design

Bad segmentation won’t allow the translator to leverage any possible TM, and so your translation costs (or your client’s) will probably be higher and there might be consistency issues to be fixed later.

If the target language is longer or shorter, spaces and tabulations might create a different visual result that the one you designed. Instead, a proper indent set allows you to automatically maintain your layout during the translation process.

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8. Use bulleted lists and numbered lists properly As for indenting with spaces and tabulations, using bulleted lists or numbered lists wrongly might damage the consistency of your translation and increase translation costs. The best way to use them is by setting the bullet/numbered list paragraph

Why using bulleted and numbered lists incorrectly is bad for your translation && It creates bad segmentation - so it’s harder or not possible to translate && Bad segmentation doesn’t allow to leverage any TMs

attribute or creating a paragraph style.

Proper bulleted lists and numbered lists allow you to automatically maintain your layout during the translation process. Why? You may ask. Because they allow you to have a clean text segment without formatting characters and, like we said before, this will result in cleaner text extracted from your file.

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9. Wrap your text with soft-returns rather than hard-returns Avoid the use of hard-returns (also known simply as returns) in a sentence. If you need to wrap the text inside a paragraph, use soft-returns. Hard-returns should only be used to mark the end of a paragraph.

While editing your InDesign file each time you use a hardreturn (paragraph mark) you are breaking the sentence and the CAT tool will interpret that as the end of the segment. So if, for example, you wrap a title to fit a specific design using a hard-return, you are creating two different segments (see picture) and the translator will hardly be able to manage the translation correctly. In fact, s/he will be left working on incomplete and unordered lines of text. Of course, this adversely affects the database of Translation Memories since it creates bad segmentation.

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A soft return or soft wrap is the break resulting from line wrap or word wrap (whether automatic or manual), whereas a hard return or hard wrap is an intentional break, creating a new paragraph. With a hard return, paragraph-break formatting can (and should) be applied (either indenting or vertical whitespace). (source: Wikipedia)

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The right solution to wrap your text in InDesign is by using soft-returns (line break). The soft-return will allow you to get the same layout result and will be imported correctly in a Translation tool. You can place a soft-return in InDesign by pressing Shift + Return.

The image shows an example of the use of soft-return inside Redokun. Let’s consider these examples. The left sentence is wrapped using a hard-return, so a CAT tool would split it into two segments “With the hard-return”, “Redokun creates two segments”. Instead the right sentence is wrapped using a soft-return, so a CAT tool would consider it as a single sentence “With the soft-return Redokun creates two segments”.

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What you should do before sending the file to translation

10. Check the orthography (InDesign Dynamic Spelling) This might sound trivial, but if you enable the integrated spell-check, you’ll be more confident that the copy is correct before sending it to the translators. It’s very handy also because you might find out copy-paste mistakes and other silly errors. Let your translators store corrected Translation Memories (TM). Activate the Dynamic Spelling feature by selecting Edit > Spelling > Dynamic Spelling and set the right language to your text. And of course, check the spelling before sending the file to translation.

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11. Pay attention to text inside images You should export all the text that needs to be translated from images and create text boxes over your images instead. This way you won’t need to create a version of each image for each language and the translators won’t have to use any other tool except the ones s/he prefers and knows (i.e. avoid putting text to translate inside an Illustrator file embedded in your InDesign file).

Text into images && Each image should be duplicated for each language && Higher probability to forget to translate some text && More tools required

Another thing to consider is also the use of inline anchored frames for your images (see Adobe guide here: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/anchored-objects.html). This way even when the translated text is longer than the source your image will be placed in the right spot.

To be sure that the text you placed above your anchored image will follow the translated text as well as the image, you will need to create a group before anchoring the image, or anchor the image text to the textual content.

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12. Set your frame to resize with your text When you replace a text written in one language with another, the new content may become longer than the previous one. If the text doesn’t fit the container, then InDesign shows a red plus sign in the bottom-right corner of the text frame - and this means that you have to resize the text-frame manually in order to visualize the entire content.

Auto resize text frames %% Less or no edits required when the new text is manually or automatically placed && The text frame might exceed the spread.

With InDesign CS6, Adobe introduced the ability to auto size text-frames. This is a handy feature that few people use. It’s very powerful and can save a ton of time since, if used correctly, it can save more than a few edits for the designer. Be aware though, that InDesign will make your text-frame grow indefinitely - even outside the spread. Also, this feature doesn’t work in the middle of threaded text-frames.

The auto size property can be applied in Object > Text Frame Options > Auto-Size. You have options to let a frame resize automatically with Height Only, Width Only, both Height and Width, and Height and Width (Keep Proportions). Of course, you can also control where you want to lock your text-frame. Once you’ve created your frame the way you like, you can create an object style, and you’re able to use it in your layout.

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13. Use column breaks and keep options In InDesign you can tell a paragraph to start in the next column, text-frame, page, odd or even page. That property can be very helpful in the case of chapter titles. In specific cases, you might want to set a title to start from the next page, so that you can make the current text-frame a little bit bigger in order to host a longer content (For instance a target language that you think might be longer than the source).

You can also apply rules on how paragraphs break across multiple frames/ pages/columns in a threaded story in the same window.

These settings are very powerful, but also very delicate. You can set them while you are working on your design, or right before starting the translation so that the content in the new language will follow your instruction. In any case, be sure to set these settings carefully in order to not create too much confusion in your document’s styles.

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14. Consider Splitting Up Threaded Stories into Separate Frames It might be silly to some people, but splitting up your threaded stories before the moving to the translation step might be extremely helpful in case of future updates to the document. Editing a document with languages that you don’t know is extremely difficult, and mistakes are easily made. You probably don’t want to translate a document entirely after a few simple updates, so a solution might be to split up all your threaded stories into separate frames so that you’ll be able to keep a reference with the text between the translated documents and the source.

A way to split up all the threaded stories is by using the script SplitStory.jsx shipped with your copy of InDesign. You can see how to do so, in this article by InDesignSecrets: http://indesignsecrets.com/splitting-up-threaded-stories-into-separate-frames.php).

15. Give them a reference If you send the translator your InDesign file or an exchange file, please always provide her/him with a pdf of the document. She/he will be able to see the graphic and therefore pick the right vocabulary to translate your file.

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What you should do when your file is translated

16. Change the language attribute When you receive your translated files, one of the first things to do, is to change the language attribute of the content. InDesign uses that attribute to verify spelling and to hyphenate words. You can change that quickly and very easily if you had used Character and Paragraph styles previously. Otherwise you can proceed with the Find/Replace feature integrated in InDesign (More here: http://indesignsecrets.com/changing-the-language-with-findchange.php).

17. Fix text-boxes size, if necessary Some languages are longer than others, so once the translation is done you might need to enlarge a few textboxes in the translated InDesign file. Of course, you can create your textboxes with enough white space beforehand to ensure that the translation will accommodate them correctly.

18. Check that all the glyphs are visualized As mentioned, when a font is missing a specific glyph InDesign replaces it with a red square inside your document’s text where the glyph is missing. So one thing to do is to check that all the glyphs are present within the fonts you’ve used for your document, and make sure that the text is correctly visualized. START YOUR FREE 14 DAY TRIAL

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19. Create a document with the languages in sequence using a Book file You might want to create a single document with all or some of the languages you translated your document to in sequence. The best way to do so is using a Book file.

A book file is a collection of documents that can share styles, swatches, master pages, and other items. You can sequentially number pages in book documents, print selected documents in a book, or export them to PDF. One document can belong to multiple book files.

You can add the translated InDesign documents in sequence to your Book and export it as a single PDF as you would normally do with a single InDesign document. More about the Book file format in the Adobe guide here: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/creating-book-files.html

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Bonus: Copy an entire layer from an InDesign file to another [Script] Here in Europe, we speak many different languages, and not everyone is good at speaking English or communicating with a foreigner partner. To solve this barrier (especially in pricing lists) sometimes companies produce their documents with a two language layout: source language + the target market language, so that their salespeople can have a direct link from one language to another. Also, we have countries that speak more than one

The script is useful for %% Creating a single InDesign file that contains all the separated language layers %% Copying a layer with one language to a new InDesign file %% Creating documents with a twolanguage layout quickly

language (the best example is probably Switzerland).

So often I’ve been asked to produce documents with a two language layout. I store each language in a layer and use different columns for different languages so that I can copy and paste the language easily among different documents and create versions with the languages the client requires.

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For me, not having a functionality inside InDesign that copies an entire layer from one document to another is tedious. So, here at Redokun, we wrote a quick script that copies an entire layer from every page of an InDesign file to another.

Here is the link to the script.

To install the script: • download it • move the file to your Scripts folder found in Applications > Adobe InDesign CC 2015 > Scripts > Scripts Panel.

To run the script: • In InDesign: open the source and destination files. Before launching the script, the source document should be the one visible. • Click on “layer-cloner-1.1.jsxbin” (you should see the script in the Script Panel in InDesign). • Select the layer you want to copy and the file you want to copy it into. • Wait for the script to complete the copy (it takes a few seconds).

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