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South-East Asian Scripts

The Adobe World-Ready Paragraph composer in InDesign provides the support for Indic, Middle Eastern, and South East Asian languages. You can create documents using text from these languages.

Note:

Text features across Adobe applications do not necessarily have feature parity as each application can rely on different text engines. Additionally, text features can vary according to the primary usage of the application (image editing, page layout, illustration, and so on), so the preservation of formatting, style, and editability across applications can also vary according to the type treatments you choose to apply.

South Eastern Asian (SEA) languages or scripts are not currently supported on all Adobe products. Moving SEA text from an Adobe app that currently supports SEA scripts to an application that does not support them, will likely result in a loss of some or all of the text copy, formatting, etc. In this case, note the following:

  • Image files may need to be flattened before moving from Photoshop to other applications.
  • Text files from Adobe Illustrator may need to be converted to outlines prior to usage in other applications.
  • Text conversions may result in a loss of editability when moved from one application to another.

Supported Asian languages

The Adobe World-Ready Paragraph composer supports the following languages:

Note:

Starting with the InDesign 19.0 version (October 2023), Harfbuzz is the default text shaping engine of the World Ready Composer. You can change the default shaping engine using a script.

Indic

Middle Eastern

South East Asian

  • Bengali
  • Gujarati
  • Hindi
  • Kannada
  • Malayalam
  • Marathi
  • Oriya
  • Punjabi
  • Tamil
  • Telugu

 

  • Arabic
  • Hebrew

For details, see Arabic and Hebrew.

 

  • Thai
  • Sinhala
  • Burmese 
  • Lao
  • Khmer

To use these languages properly on Windows, you must install the language and font packs for the particular language you want to use.

For details, see Microsoft's Help documentation: Language Packs.

Select a language

You can select a relevant language option in the Language drop-down menu of the Character section in the Properties panel. This option is used to check hyphenation and spelling.

Character panel

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