Japanese RUBI typesetting

Creating Japanese Rubi print materials 

Adelphi has over 20 years of experience providing Rubi (Sometimes called Ruby) Japanese typesetting services, including localizing brochures, manuals, and packaging into Japanese and making them ready for print.

What is Rubi

In Japanese typesetting, Rubi refers to small annotations, typically written in hiragana, that accompany kanji characters to indicate their pronunciation. This is commonly known as “Furigana” in Japanese.

Vertical Japanese typesetting, known as Tategumi (縦組み) is commonly used in printed materials such as newspapers, magazines, novels, and comics. Tategumi can also incorporate Rubi, which are annotations that provide phonetic readings. Below is an example of the word “birthday 誕生日” where the Rubi gives the phonetic reading, which reads as “tanjoubi たんじょうび “.

Creating Furigana or Rubi using InDesign can be challenging since the software requires specific features that are not available in a standard Western version of InDesign to handle these annotations effectively. Also, there should be a native Japanese speaker responsible for creating the Rubi.

Adelphi provides Japanese translations and Japanese typesetting and has worked with numerous advertising and design agencies to help their clients enter the Japanese markets and tailor their messages for a Japanese audience. We also serve translation agencies worldwide. We have been a trusted supplier for well-known companies, including Disney, Jaguar Land Rover, the Royal Armouries, HSBC, Barclays Bank, Vidal Sassoon, the Overseas Development Institute, and Amnesty International. Each month, we produce financial materials specifically designed for the Japanese market.

All our Japanese typesetting services are handled in-house by a native Japanese project manager, who oversees each project from start to finish. We do not outsource typesetting work to external suppliers, ensuring maximum confidentiality and quality control.

Japanese fonts

We have an extensive list of over 100 Japanese fonts.

A basic guide to translation of InDesign files using translation software

By using an IDML file exported from InDesign we can speed up the translation and typesetting process when using translation memory software. This method keeps all the formatting from the original InDesign file such as links, character and paragraph styles and fonts plus any interactive elements such as cross-references.

Click here to read more information

Graphics localization

We can also localize any graphics in the document using Photoshop or Illustrator, depending on the image we could require the original layered data with live text, not outlined text. We have the latest Adobe CC applications.

Data required

We need the English original data for us to adapt it to Japanese using InDesign, QuarkXPress, and other professional typesetting software, this is usually supplied by the design agency as a “data collect” or “package” which includes all images, fonts, and links (images) to the document. Without these, we cannot create a print-ready PDF as the deliverable.

Deliverable data

We supply the Japanese typeset document as an InDesign data collect and as a print-ready PDF set to your specifications.

Book localization