Switching InDesign's UI Language (in Windows)
October 11, 2009 | Extras | en | fr
In a recent post, David Blatner (InDesignSecrets) offered us a free Mac OS application for InDesign to be displayed in various languages. Amazing tool for experiencing the user interface as translated for other countries. Fortunately Windows users can switch the UI too, by means of the Windows Registry.
The Windows Registry contains an Adobe/InDesign/<version>/User Interface Locale Setting DWORD value which encodes the current application language.
• Under Windows XP systems the complete path of that magic key (ID CS4) is:
HKLM/SOFTWARE/Adobe/InDesign/6.0/User Interface Locale Setting
• Under Vista 64-bit you'll find the key at:
HKLM/SOFTWARE/Wow6432node/Adobe/InDesign/6.0/User Interface Locale Setting
(according to Igor Freiberger).
The screen capture below shows how the Registry Editor (Run › regedit) displays the UI locale value from a French Windows XP system:
Note that the locale code is 4, corresponding to the French UI. Now suppose I want to see what InDesign looks like in Italian. There's nothing to it! From the Registry Editor, let's double-click on the User Interface Locale Setting field and change the value to b (hexadecimal) or 11 (decimal). Here is the display when I relaunch InDesign:
It's a good idea to backup the settings from the Registry Editor before playing with other values:
1) Right-click on the key (6.0) on the left panel
2) Select Export
3) Type a file name (e.g. myIndesignLocale)
4) In the Export Range zone, make sure that Selected branch is checked, then save.
Now, if you want to revert to the initial locale setting, you just need to double-click myIndesignLocale.reg. It's also possible and easy to edit as plain text a reg file for each specific locale. The only data you need to put in the Registration File will look like this:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe\InDesign\6.0] "User Interface Locale Setting"=dword:0000000b
The last line contains the hexadecimal 8-digit code of the locale: 0000000b in our example (Italian UI).
Actually I didn't find any documentation about this encoding. I share with you the result of my investigation:
| LOCALE | DEC. | DWORD (hexa) | LANGUAGE |
|---|---|---|---|
| en_US | 01 | 00000001 | English (US) |
| en_GB | 02 | 00000002 | English (UK) |
| de_DE | 03 | 00000003 | German |
| fr_FR | 04 | 00000004 | French |
| ja_JP | 05 | 00000005 | Japanese |
| es_ES | 06 | 00000006 | Spanish |
| pt_BR | 07 | 00000007 | Portuguese (Brazil) |
| sv_SE | 08 | 00000008 | Swedish |
| da_DK | 09 | 00000009 | Danish |
| nl_NL | 10 | 0000000a | Dutch (Netherlands) |
| it_IT | 11 | 0000000b | Italian |
| nb_NO | 12 | 0000000c | Norwegian Bokmål |
| fi_FI | 13 | 0000000d | Finnish |
| el_GR | 14 | 0000000e | Modern Greek |
| cs_CZ | 15 | 0000000f | Czech |
| pl_PL | 16 | 00000010 | Polish |
| — | — | — | — |
| hu_HU | 18 | 00000012 | Hungarian |
| ru_RU | 19 | 00000013 | Russian |
| — | — | — | — |
| ro_RO | 23 | 00000017 | Romanian |
| — | — | — | — |
| uk_UA | 30 | 0000001e | Ukrainian |
| ht_IL | 31 | 0000001f | Hebrew (Israel) |
| ar_AE | 32 | 00000020 | Arabic (UAE) |
| zh_CN | 33 | 00000021 | Chinese (China) |
| zh_TW | 34 | 00000022 | Chinese (Taiwan) |
| ko_KR | 35 | 00000023 | Korean |
(Any undefined value will turn the InDesign UI locale to en_US.)
Comments
Great -- thanks very much, Marc.
Peter
FYI - In the SDK there's a file called 'WLocaleIds.h' which lists the values above, and also a few more values - don't know if any of these work:
hr_HR 0x0011 //Croatian
sk_SK 0x0014 //Slovak
sq_AL 0x0015 //Albanian
tr_TR 0x0016 //Turkish
bg_BG 0x0018 //Bulgarian
be_BY 0x0019 //Belarussian
et_EE 0x001a //Estonian
lv_LV 0x001b //Latvian
lt_LT 0x001c //Lithuanian
sl_SL 0x001d //Slovenian
ta_IN 0x0024 // Tamil
th_TH 0x0025 // Thai
vi_VN 0x0026 // Vietnamese
Thanks Kris,
Apparently your values fill the gap.
Curiously they didn't work on my system... (The locale was defaulted to en_US.)
Usually, when one modifies the registry locale setting and runs InDesign, a corresponding "xx_YY" folder (e.g "fr_FR") is created under <user>/Application Data/Adobe/InDesign/Version 6.0/
I will retry with your values.
Thanks for the reference, Marc.
Do you know if there is a ready-to-use script to do this: select and copy the whole contents of an ID document and then paste them in the document under edition in ID.
I work with judicial decisions and there are dozens of pieces of text which are partial decisions already made to be used in further cases (a library of standards). According to the situation, I need to bring some of these pieces to the decision under construction.
Nowadays I do this with an ID library. But I think it would be possible to create a script to each piece/partial decision. So I just run it and the text is placed where I'm writing.
As scripts could be organized with folders/subfolders, the themes can be organised in a much better way than the plain library mode.
I know this is not the proper place to ask this question, but I cannot find a way to contact you.
TIA.