Passing Unicode line return characters set in Class to client side (DWR/HTML/UTF8) for InDesign Team

Question

I've built a content management tool that allows a product team to create and manage product that gets exported to a website and for a different team of designers to create print ads for newspapers displaying the same product data.

My problem is with the InDesign graphic designers and the macros that they use within InDesign. The macros have the ability to take copy/pasted text/data and auto format the text inside InDesign based on the presence of certain characters. In particular the design team uses tab, "soft line break" (shift return), and regular line breaks (hard returns) in their macros.

Right now I generate a block of text with the records and the desired formatting characters in a java Class and then that's sent via DWR to the client side. When there is a requirement for a tab character I send \t, return is \r and I was hoping that a soft line break would be \n however InDesign seems to regard both \r and \n as a regular line break.

I had given up on being able to pass a soft-return until yesterday when I cam across Unicode \u2028 (soft line break) and \u2029 (regular line break). I've tried outputting both of these characters instead of \r and \n in the hopes that InDesign may regard these characters differently. In the box that the designers copy the output from it looks like there is no character there. There's no line break at all in the places where I've specific \u2028 to appear. When I copy/paste the output into a text editor it shows me that there is an unrecognized character there (it displays as a box with a question mark around it).

Platform is Java/MySQL running on Tomcat.

To date, I haven't had to deal too much with character encoding in this application. Header has <meta charset="utf-8" /> set but that's about it so far. I've tried setting this to utf-16 but it doesn't change the output. All of the tables in the MySQL database are set to utf8/utf8_general_ci.

Thoughts? How can I force InDesign to take copy/pasted text and recognize all of its macro capable characters? Actually, it's just the soft line breaks that it's not recognizing. HELP! :)

Thank you. Sorry this is so long!

Ryan V

Answer 1

I've been playing around with ID CS6 (OS X) for a while and I can't for the life of me get it to recognize a pasted LF as a forced line break. LF and CR and CRLF all go to paragraph breaks. U+2028 and U+2029 are display as empty glyphs, not breaks.

I'm a little wary of posting this as an answer, but I'll give it a go:

You might consider providing the text as a downloaded .txt file. CS5 introduced "Tagged Text" (a sort of XML-ish text document with full support for InDesign characters, attributes, etc.,) so this means your designers will be able to place the text file and InDesign will treat everything as intended.

To turn your existing text into CS5+'s Tagged Text (see the reference here), plop a <ASCII-MAC> or <ASCII-WIN> (as appropriate) as the first line and escape any '<' or '>'s with a backslash, then you're free to use <0x000A> as a forced line break. (literally those 8 characters)

That's probably mega-overkill, but it's certainly the most stupidly reliable way I can think of. I'll edit if I get anything else working.

NB. "forced line break" is the term InDesign itself uses for the character produced by Shift+Enter, your "soft line break;" contrast with "paragraph break" for a standard carriage return. InDesign apparently represents forced breaks with LF (U+000A) and paragraph breaks with CR (U+000D).

Answer 2

I'm not sure how you were trying to transfer and print out your characters (if you post your DWR and javascript code I might be able to help more), but one thing I would try is to ensure that your java output is actual UTF-8 using something like:

String yourRecordString = "Some line 1. \u2028Some line 2.";
ByteBuffer bb = Charset.forName("UTF-8").encode(yourRecordString);  

Then, you can write out the bytes in bb into an output stream/file and check them. (Make sure to write them as bytes and not as a String nor as chars.) For example, the UTF-8 encoding of \u2028 is E2 80 A8, so you should see that sequence at the appropriate place in your output. (I use hexmode in vim for things like this.)

Then, make sure that these bytes get received back on the javascript side. (While I'm not an expert with DWR, I might prefer to make your java function return something other than a String.)

This should at least help you diagnose where the problem lies. If you do see that sequence and if InDesign still isn't recognizing the soft line breaks, then you at least know the problem is with InDesign and that you will have to find some other solution (such as modifying the designer's macros to recognize other characters).

(Also, note that you can see the default encoding for your JVM using Charset.defaultCharset(). My guess is that your default is not UTF-8 and that InDesign may have also had a problem with the UTF-16 you tried due to endianess or something like that.)