Localization parity
Last reviewed: 2026-10-11 · Last updated: 2026-10-23 · Change: minor (missing translations are reported, never a failure; catalog counts remain the 2026-10-10 measurement) · Target: Adobe InDesign 2026 (21.6)
Per-language status of the Litho interface and of document typesetting in each script. Script-specific typesetting detail: cjk.md, cjk-typography.md, arabic-typography.md. Overall numbers: target-app-parity.md.
Dimension score: ~45% ready (estimated), 120–180 h plus native-speaker review (human).
How it was measured
Interface strings live in crates/ui-egui/src/i18n.rs (a
shared table with German, French, Spanish, Japanese and Simplified
Chinese columns) and
crates/ui-egui/src/i18n/{ar,cs,it,ja,ka,pt_br,uk}.rs.
Untranslated strings fall back to English. A script (2026-10-10) built
the set of English interface strings as the union of every catalog's
keys, every engine command label and every literal passed to
tr/t in the UI crate: 1,724
strings. A further ~145 capitalized literals in the UI crate
appear in no catalog (some are test data or proper names), so the true
total is somewhat higher and every percentage below is a slight
overestimate. Help: Litho has no help content in any language (Help ▸
opens the project's pages).
A missing translation never fails a test, a build or a release.
cargo xtask i18n-report (also a step of
cargo xtask ci, so the list is in every gate log) prints
how many interface strings each language lacks, then the strings.
InDesign 2026 ships 25 interface localizations (.lproj
folders: cs, da, de, el, en, en_GB, es, fi, fr, hu, it, ja, ko, nb, nl,
pl, pt, ro, ru, sq, sv, tr, uk, zh_CN, zh_TW); Arabic and Hebrew come as
Middle East editions with an English or French interface and
right-to-left features.
Key languages
| Language | Code | InDesign 2026 UI | UI strings translated | Dialogs / tooltips / help | Script support (documents and UI) | Native review | Status | To full (h) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | en | ✓ | 1,724 / 1,724 (100%) | all / all / none | Latin ✓ | yes | full | 0 |
| Simplified Chinese (Mandarin) | zh | ✓ (zh_CN) | 1,438 (83%) | menus, panels, most dialogs; tooltips partly; no help | CJK typesetting ✓ (cjk.md); canvas IME ✓, not checked by hand with a system IME (#322); CJK UI font not embedded in release builds, so boxes on Linux (#332) | no | partial | 25–40 |
| Spanish | es | ✓ | 1,438 (83%) | menus, panels, most dialogs; no help | Latin ✓; Spanish hyphenation ✓ (#222) | no | partial | 5–8 |
| Hindi | hi | ✗ | 0 (0%) | none | Devanagari shaped by harfrust in documents but untested; no Hindi hyphenation or spelling | no | none | 20–30 |
| Arabic | ar | Middle East edition (English/French UI) | 1,459 (85%) | menus, panels, most dialogs; no help | RTL UI text (rtl.rs: bidi + shaping); Arabic
composition, kashida, digits, RTL stories and tables ✓
(arabic-typography.md); list bullets and multi-column RTL open
(#100) |
no | partial | 15–25 |
| French | fr | ✓ | 1,438 (83%) | menus, panels, most dialogs; no help | Latin ✓; no French hyphenation | no | partial | 6–10 |
| Portuguese (Brazil) | pt-br | ✓ (pt) | 1,057 (61%) | menus, panels, some dialogs; no help | Latin ✓; Portuguese hyphenation ✓ | no | partial | 8–12 |
| Indonesian | id | ✗ | 0 (0%) | none | Latin ✓ | no | none | 12–18 |
| Japanese | ja | ✓ | 1,644 (95%) | whole interface (#272), vertical-type commands; no help | vertical text, kinsoku, aki, ruby, warichu ✓ (partial depth, cjk.md); canvas IME ✓, not checked by hand (#322); Japanese UI and Mincho fonts from craft-fonts | no | partial | 6–10 (+ IME checks, shared with zh) |
| German | de | ✓ | 1,438 (83%) | menus, panels, most dialogs; no help | Latin ✓; no German hyphenation (InDesign ships 2006 reform patterns) | no | partial | 6–10 |
| Korean | ko | ✓ | 0 (0%) | none | Korean line breaking at spaces ✓; canvas IME ✓, not checked by hand (#322) | no | none | 15–25 |
| Vietnamese | vi | ✗ | 0 (0%) | none | Latin with stacked diacritics via harfrust, untested | no | none | 12–18 |
Percentages are of the 1,724 measured strings. A language is
full only when every user-visible string is translated and
its script renders and edits correctly; none but English is.
Japanese follow-up (2026-10-11): print ranges, imported style
handling, the built-in (import) caption, table row/column
movement and row-height distribution now use the existing translation
catalog. Print, import options and an active table were rendered in
Japanese and English with craft-fonts. The language totals above retain
their dated measurement; this is a targeted fix.
Other shipped languages
| Language | Code | UI strings translated | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Czech | cs | 1,722 (99%), plural categories handled | partial |
| Italian | it | 1,464 (85%) | partial |
| Ukrainian | uk | 1,432 (83%), plural categories handled | partial |
| Polish | pl | 1,717 (99%), count captions category-first; AI-drafted, awaiting native review | partial |
| Georgian | ka | 1,724 (~100%: every catalog key plus the command labels the others
lack), count captions as noun: n |
partial (reviewed by a native speaker) |
Litho ships 5 interface languages beyond the twelve; InDesign ships 17 beyond its eight of the twelve (cs, da, el, en_GB, fi, hu, it, nb, nl, pl, ro, ru, sq, sv, tr, uk, zh_TW).
Document languages
InDesign 2026 hyphenates and spell-checks ~40 languages (Hunspell and Duden dictionaries). Litho hyphenates English, Spanish, Portuguese and Norwegian and spell-checks English only. Text language can be set per paragraph and character (Properties, Character panel) and drives quotes and locale shaping. See typography-parity.md.
Remaining effort
| Work | Opus 5.5 h |
|---|---|
| Fill the 83–85% catalogs (de, fr, es, zh, ar, it, uk; ~290 strings each) | 25–40 |
| pt-BR to full | 8–12 |
| New: Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Vietnamese (1,724 strings, plural rules, tests) | 50–75 |
| Canvas IME (zh, ja, ko): checks by hand with system IMEs, and fixes | 10–20 |
| CJK UI font in every release build; Devanagari and Vietnamese rendering tests | 10–15 |
Catalog completeness test: every tr key and command
label present in every catalog |
4–8 |
| Help content (at least English, then the twelve) | 15–25 |
| Total | 120–180 + native-speaker review for 11 languages (human) |
Revision history
| Date | Change | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-11 | minor | Localized Japanese print, import and table controls; checked Japanese and English renders |
| 2026-10-14 | minor | Georgian (ka) interface added |
| 2026-10-10 | major | Created: catalogs measured (1,724 strings), the twelve key languages plus Italian and Ukrainian |
| 2026-10-11 | minor | Czech (cs) added: 1,722 strings, plural categories handled |
| 2026-10-13 | minor | Polish interface added (1,717 strings) |