Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and other Indian scripts to InDesign

Scripts we have run, and how each is set

Each of these opened in InDesign 2026 on a Mac in our last run of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That is our test text: on your own file, check Type > Find Font and the Preflight panel. InDesign also lists Odia, and the file has a font for it, but no Odia text is in our test set, so we make no claim about it. A language InDesign does not list is tagged [No Language], which leaves it without a dictionary for spelling and hyphenation.

What the file does

• Each paragraph in an Indian script takes the World-Ready composer, the way InDesign's own exports do. In the default composer letters stand apart and vowel signs land in the wrong place.
• A letter the document's font lacks is set in the Noto face for its script, named in your font list.
• Lines keep the line height of the font Word named, so a page does not grow because a fallback face is taller.
• Text is tagged with its own language where InDesign lists it, as the table above shows, so InDesign's dictionary for it applies.
• A word too wide for its line breaks between whole clusters: a conjunct or a vowel sign stays with its letter.

PDFs are the hard part

Many Indian-language PDFs hold a broken text layer: signs on no letter, signs doubled, unknown glyphs. Broken layers run from 6% to 37% of a page's words, and sound ones stay under 5%. Where a page's layer is that broken, we do not trust it and read the page as a scan.

A PDF in an old custom font such as Preeti holds Latin letters drawn as Devanagari ones. That text cannot be recovered from the file today, so expect to retype it.

Some layers lose a few signs without looking broken, and a page like that may pass. If a Hindi line reads oddly in the Word copy, compare it with the PDF.

Checking the result

1. Open the Word copy first and read a few lines against the PDF.
2. Install the fonts from the list.
3. Open the IDML and read the same lines in InDesign. If conjuncts stand apart, check that the paragraph's composer is the World-Ready one.

Older versions set these scripts differently

Indian text stands in the same places on InDesign 2024, 2025 and 2026, and on a Mac. On 2021 and 2022, about 6% of its lines stand elsewhere, so read those pages again if a file moves from one of those versions to a newer one.

In a translation tool

Bengali and Malayalam write zero-width joiners inside words. Okapi lifts those characters out of the text as inline codes, and it does the same with InDesign's own IDML exports, which write them as we do. So a translator may see a tag inside a word. Keep it there: it decides how the letters join.