I’m happy to report that I figured out an intermediary solution to typesetting Hebrew and Arabic in InDesign. What I do is pull the text into TextEdit (and I suppose Word would work just as well), format it the way I want (right-to-left), and print it to PDF. I can then place it in InDesign and it shows up perfectly in print, with no quality loss. (The preview doesn’t look as good, but it turns out fine.)
Caveats: this probably isn’t a good way to typeset a long text (anything more than a couple of pages), since you have to freeze everything in PDF first. It’s doable, of course, but just a tad bit crazy. :)
It’s also not a particularly ideal way to include Arabic/Hebrew words within the flow of a paragraph (intermingled with English or another left-to-right language). Again, I think you could do it, but if you’re doing more than a few words, I’d suggest getting the Middle Eastern edition of InDesign.
Anyway, this is enough for me to do the bilingual Hebrew/English psalter. Mmm. :)
[tags]Hebrew, Arabic, InDesign, PDF[/tags]
Comments
I don’t know if you know, but there is a version of InDesign with special features for typesetting Hebrew/Arabic text.
It’s called InDesign ME (Middle East edition):
http://www.adobe.com/ceea/products/ME/indesign/MEoptions.html
If you do enough typsetting you should probably call Adobe and ask about switching to the ME version.
Thanks for the heads up. Alas, I don’t do enough Hebrew/Arabic typesetting (yet) to warrant it, especially as CS3 will be coming out next year, but it’s nice to know that there’s an option available.
Throw in your two cents