But unless you have an ME version of an application, the World-Ready Composer isn’t directly accessible in the CS4 applications as shipped.

One of the goals of this move was to unify file formats and code between western, CJK, and ME versions of the applications. The CS4 versions of these apps have an alternate composition engine, the World-Ready Composer, which enables support for “complex script” languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, and the Indic languages. One cool thing Adobe did in the Creative Suite 4 product cycle was to work on global text support across several products, including InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. Winsoft has long offered special “ ME” versions of Adobe applications (with full support for Arabic and Hebrew, though not the Indic or other Asian languages), but none of this functionality was in the standard versions of Adobe’s Creative Suite applications before CS4. Standards such as Unicode only provide a framework around which such additional processes must be built-they don’t provide the code. (Note that InDesign added Thai layout functionality in its regular composition engine back in CS3, although with some limitations.) Then there are right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, which require further capabilities. Some languages, notably Thai and Lao, do not even have spaces between words, and therefore need special dictionaries just to get correct line breaking. Many Indic languages assemble multiple characters into a single visual “cluster” (sort of like a syllable), using complicated shaping rules. However, many left-to-right languages of south and south-east Asia (such as Thai, Lao and the Indic languages) require additional language-specific processing to get the right glyph output given the incoming character stream. Why would you even need something special for global text layout? For most basic left-to-right languages, if the fonts you are using have all the right glyphs, the regular version of the Adobe application will do an adequate job out of the box. This will help you figure out which might be right for your needs, and even provide some basic tools to help you get started, if your needs are not too extensive. Prices range from free to more expensive than the base version of the application. None of them are obvious or documented in the regular versions of the application, but there are a dizzying variety of options: templates scripts InDesign plug-ins and special “ ME” versions of applications.

This is a guide to options and tools for laying out global text in the CS4 versions of InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator.

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