Khmer script justification is broken in Adobe InDesign

Sovichet Tep

Hello. Recently, Adobe announced its official support for 5 Asian scripts including Khmer in Photoshop (and Illustrator). I'm not sure if that includes InDesign, but it renders Khmer script well through World-Ready Paragraph Composer until the paragraph justification is set. I tried to change the leading, the spacing, and any other option available, but I couldn't get it working.

See the image below.

• Adobe InDesign CC 2017 (also tried in CC 2018, the same results.)
• Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer
• Zero-width spaces are used in the text to mark the word boundaries, somehow important for Khmer text.

I also opened a bug report here: https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/36534535-khmer-script-justification-is-broken, but no reply.

I hope this could reach people from Adobe. Please correct me if I said anything wrong.

Thomas Phinney

Photoshop and Illustrator use a different text engine than InDesign does. So, we shouldn't assume ID will have the same support.

Vasil Stanev

Thomas Phinney said:

Photoshop and Illustrator use a different text engine than InDesign does. So, we shouldn't assume ID will have the same support.

Where can I read more on that engine?

Thomas Phinney

Last time I was involved in such things, the Photoshop/Illustrator text layout engine was called the Adobe Text Engine (or ATE). Obviously it was not optimized as much for huge text runs as InDesign’s text engine, but the main thing is just knowing that these two apps share a text engine, and that it’s different from InDesign’s. So behaviors and what is supported often differ on that basis.

Of course at the lower level of font support there is CoolType, which provides access to fonts and OpenType features and the like. Occasionally something may in fact be a limitation of CoolType itself. But mostly people have issues “above” that.