A ‘designing for localization’ mindset should be kept to the fore from day 1 when designing the documents that will go on to be translated and/or localized. Designing solely for PDF may lead to localization issues downstream. 

This is especially true when it comes to one2edit™, which allows non-designers to directly edit InDesign-document content in a controlled manner. The controlled environment requires that documents be designed in such a way as to streamline the translation process. 

A main feature of the translation process is that different languages take up different amounts of space. Therefore, when you are creating a master document for translation and localization purposes, you must ensure that there is sufficient space for the target languages to grow (or space for text frames to automatically grow into). 

Alternatively, styles may be created to display and fit different languages and character sets, thus enabling a greater (or lesser) amount of text to fit into the original design, and the correct characters to be displayed, all while still adhering to the brand guidelines. 

For example, French text typically needs up to 30% more space than that same text in English. Therefore, there either needs to be room for the text to grow by 30% within the current design, or styles need to be created in advance that will compress 30% more text into the current area. 

Moreover, given that the text flow may change, anchoring objects to specific points in the text flow may be required so that the location of content remains consistent after the translation has occurred. 

This document covers some of the main topics of what should and should not be done when creating documents for a localization/translation use-case.