Kannada text looks different - URGENT HELP!

[wickedcheese]

Hi all, I’m a designer who doesn’t know Kannada and need some help with Kannada text on an epub project I’m working on. My client has come back and said the text is wrong, and on comparing both (see image I attached), a version from Google and another from Indesign, the words do look different. So the issues I have is:

• Has the meaning of the words changed even though the characters look different?
• Why do they look different? And which is correct?
• Is this a font problem?

Appreciate any help I can get regarding this, thank you so much!

[Doitsu]

InDesign has poor track record when it comes to rendering fonts with combining diacritics. Designers often need buy third-party plugins (e.g. IndicPlus) or a region-specific InDesign version.

The short answer is you probably can't use your version of InDesign to do the job.

Originally Posted by wickedcheese

• Why do they look different? And which is correct?

The Google version is correct. To give you an example, the first word in your screenshot, ನೀವು, consists of two consonants and two vowel signs:

1: U+0CA8 ನ KANNADA LETTER NA
2: U+0CC0 ೀ KANNADA VOWEL SIGN II
3: U+0CB5 ವ KANNADA LETTER VA
4: U+0CC1 ು KANNADA VOWEL SIGN U

However, InDesign (or the epub app) renders it as: ನ ೀವ ು. That is not acceptable to Kannada speakers. Depending on the amount of text, you could fix this by pre-rendering the text with a different DTP app as a vector image and embedding the image.

It's also quite possible that the output generated by InDesign was valid, but the app that your client used to test the epub doesn't support Indic character shaping. (Very few do.)
Ask your client what app he used to test the .epub.

[wickedcheese]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

InDesign has poor track record when it comes to rendering fonts with combining diacritics. Designers often need buy third-party plugins (e.g. IndicPlus) or a region-specific InDesign version.

The short answer is you probably can't use your version of InDesign to do the job.


The Google version is correct. To give you an example, the first word in your screenshot, ನೀವು, consists of two consonants and two vowel signs:

1: U+0CA8 ನ KANNADA LETTER NA
2: U+0CC0 ೀ KANNADA VOWEL SIGN II
3: U+0CB5 ವ KANNADA LETTER VA
4: U+0CC1 ು KANNADA VOWEL SIGN U

However, InDesign (or the epub app) renders it as: ನ ೀವ ು. That is not acceptable to Kannada speakers. Depending on the amount of text, you could fix this by pre-rendering the text with a different DTP app as a vector image and embedding the image.

It's also quite possible that the output generated by InDesign was valid, but the app that your client used to test the epub doesn't support Indic character shaping. (Very few do.)
Ask your client what app he used to test the .epub.

Ahh I see, thanks so much for the help, you've no idea how much of a lifesaver you are lol! I'll go try out the plugin and see what happens. Cheers!