I have to layout tons of UTF 8 data from a MySQL database.
There is one problem. The designer picked a font that does not contain the Japanese characters. But there is much inline-Japanese in the text.
So the imported text has many pink areas (characters not present in font).
So I search for any of the following options:
- Is there a way to define a fall-back font (like webbrowsers do). If you view UTF in TextEdit (mac) or in the browser, all weird characters are displayed using Osaka. Is there a way to let Indesign replace pink squares with Osaka?
- Is there a way to SELECT all pink squares, and apply a character-style to them? That way I can create a characterstyle with the Osaka font
- Is there a way to have InDesign parse some sort of markup-elements in plain text? I could tweak the MySQL output with PHP to wrap all strange symbols in a markup-item like [japanese]blabla[/japanese]. If that would be converted to characterstyle "Japanese" on import, I would be helped a lot as well.
- The font hack: is there a way to load all available characters in the designfont into Osaka and replace those characters and make Osaka2? Or would that result in a mess?
I think some automation to get a character style on the pink areas is the best, as that allows to tweak font height and baseline shift to match the other font.
Does anybody know one of the four or maybe a fifth way to tackle my problem?