Scaling Multilingual DTP by Eliminating Manual InDesign Text Overset Fixes
Are you struggling with text overset after translation? If you work in multilingual publishing, you’ve probably run into this problem more times than you can count. I’ve spent over a decade working across translation agencies and in-house manufacturing environments, using tools like Trados on a daily basis. One recurring bottleneck has always been post-translation DTP—especially text overset in InDesign. When you translate from Japanese into English, or from English into languages like German or Russian, text expansion is almost inevitable. Layouts that worked perfectly in the source language suddenly break, and text starts overflowing frames. Why text overset becomes a real problem in multilingual layouts For main body text, overset can sometimes be mitigated by threading text frames and letting content flow into the next frame. That works to a point. Captions are a different story. Captions usually live in fixed-size frames. They’re often positioned tightly near figures or diagrams, ...