8 ms·
Why It's So Hard to Design Arabic Typefaces
- msoad 11y agoTo better understand what actual Arabic looks like take a look at this phrases which is also available as a single Unicode code point and the same thing written using regular characters: ﷽ vs بِسْمِ ٱللّٰهِ ٱلرَّحْمٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ In my understanding, before computers even when people were writing Kufi they never used the same shape for a letter across their writings.
- hnyc1357 11y agoFor the curious, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismillah_ar-Rahman,_ar-Raheem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismillah_ar-Rahman,_ar-Rahe... If people want to learn to read arabic a bit, at just the signboard level, to get by if you happen to be stranded in the Middle East or something, grouping the characters into similar patterns can make it a lot easier: http://gituser1357.github.io/arabic-alphabet.html http://gituser1357.github.io/arabic-alphabet.html
- david-given 11y agoDoes Arabic have a similar enough set of phonemes to English to be able to write English using the Arabic script? Not that it's a particularly useful thing to do in of itself, but the script itself is beautiful, and I'd be interested to play with it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- gryn 11y agoYes you can you'll have to use an extended version of the alphabet (the characters that have 3 dots on them) and you'll also be kinda forced to use diacritics
- schoen 11y agoYou wouldn't be able to get some very basic English sounds with only the Arabic letters used to write Arabic. (For example, /v/, /p/, and the distinction between /dʒ/ and /g/.) But the Arabic script has been used to write a whole lot of languages (some of them completely unrelated to Arabic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_script#Languages_currently_written_with_the_Arabic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_script#Languages_curren... and sometimes by adding additional letters or reinterpreting letters to represent phonemes that Arabic doesn't have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_script#Special_letters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_script#Special_letters It's much like the way the Hebrew alphabet was modified to write Yiddish (a Germanic language), including the addition of new letters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish_orthography#The_Yiddish_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish_orthography#The_Yiddis... One example in the Arabic script is the letter pe (پ), which is very basic in Persian (an Indo-European language written with the Arabic script) but doesn't occur in the original Arabic alphabet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe_%28Persian_letter%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe_%28Persian_letter%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_alphabet#Changes_from_the_Arabic_writing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_alphabet#Changes_from_...
- executesorder66 11y agoIt worked for Afrikaans[0], so I suppose it would also work for English. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_Afrikaans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_Afrikaans
- ajuc 11y agoEnglish script doesn't, and we use it for English language, so why not?
- gotchange 11y agoTheoretically, Arabic no but Persian yes. I can say with confidence that Persian have phonemes such as /v/, /p/, and the clear distinction between /j/ and /g/ because you might find this funny that Standard Arabic doesn't have a /g/ phoneme but in other derivative variations like Egyptian, Yemeni, Omani, it's featured prominently, and when they like to denote that, they esp. Levantine people usually resort to write it as غ like in «Google غوغل» which is the equivalent of the Parisian /r/, which is in my opinion it's still wrong, very wrong actually. It's safer for you to go with Persian other than Arab if the existence of these equivalent phonemes is a priority for you.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- halov 11y agoHere's example of using Arabic script to transcribe an European language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arebica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arebica
- chris_wot 11y agoIs that long letter what they call a kashida?
- msoad 11y agoYes.
- Mimick 11y agoI'm Arab. And almost nothing on this article is accurate. Arabs are so behind on IT. But on fonts and design I can say they are one of the best on the world. There's a huge number of open source Arab fonts on Arab websites. It's not so hard to design an Arabic typeface, it's only more work. You need to work on every letter 3 times since it doesn't show up the same depends on were the letter is on the word (first, between two letters, or last) most of the letters need to only be edited depends on their place but a few are totally different. Note that you write Arabic letters "glowed?" to each others. I think the things that stand on the face of Arabic fonts to be more used are that people used to Arial/Tahoma and that browsers aren't supporting downloading fonts smoothly yet. Also if all software used UTF-8 by default it would be great. I see a lot of software trying to handle Arabic with some stupid hacks.
- scarmig 11y agoI have no idea why this comment has downvotes--what's wrong with it? If there is actually an inaccuracy in Mimick's argument, I'm eager to hear it, as a naif in Arabic typography.
- eru 11y agoIt's best to ignore early downvotes.
- tempodox 11y agoDownvotes should be deactivated. If someone really disagrees, they should do better than just throw zero bits at people without explanation. Downvotes only cause confusion and don't improve the conversation any.
- Retra 11y agoDown-votes are a way of distinguishing between posts that actively degrade the environment versus those that are just passive noise (like redundant comments.) Fanatical behavior thrives without them.
- sandGorgon 11y agoanother plug for the Noto typeface - one of the few with Naskh Arabic and Urdu/Persian Nastaliq typefaces (https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/39 https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/39)
- martiuk 11y agoI love square kufi even though I can't read it, I assume it's impractical for a typeface? http://www.sakkal.com/instrctn/sq_kufi_hashem.html http://www.sakkal.com/instrctn/sq_kufi_hashem.html
- chris_wot 11y agoSo if I'm not mistaken (my wife's family is of Lebanese descent, so I did short course on Arabic years ago; also I had to learn a little when I was working on LibreOffice) but the difficulties with Arabic are: - Each character can have a final, medial or initial form; it all depends on where the character is located in the word - it's a cursive script, so letters join together... - it uses ligatures in (what appears to me at least) complex ways - kashida elongates letters, but there are typographic and aesthetic rules for when and how it should be used. - there are complexities galore around diacritics [1] and text justification [2] 1. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.4734.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.4734.pdf 2. http://www.tug.org/tugboat/tb27-2/tb87benatia.pdf http://www.tug.org/tugboat/tb27-2/tb87benatia.pdf
- Jimmy 11y ago>Typeface design has a western normativity problem Why does it seem like everything has a western normativity problem? What things have an eastern normativity problem?
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoHave you considered the trajectory of history over the last 500 years or so.
- Jimmy 11y agoYou'll have to enlighten me.
- Eyas 11y agonot the gp, but I think the parent commenter means that most technological advances of the last century took place in the West and thus suffers Euro/Western-centrism. A thousand years ago, when the Islamic caliphate was a center of science and research, Farsi and Arabic were the major languages of scientific publications and inquiry, and there was likely Eastern-centrism in many of its aspects. Software, programming language, web-design, typography, etc. was all developed for the west and internationallization was not a major concern. Consider, for example, the timetable for the development and standardization of ASCII vs UTF-8, as well as trends of the use of UTF-8 in the web (vs. ASCII) and browser support for UTF-8. Western-centrism is not the result of malice, but it still happens. Take Medium, for example, which launched a few years ago without proper support for RTL languages and still doesn't do a good job at that. This is a classic trade-off you do when building an "MVP". The trouble is that there is an entire ecosystem where reasonable software-engineering tradeoffs read to one culture/set of cultures being prioritized over others. Short of people of RTL cultures creating their own twitter, medium, etc., there will always be a gap. Of course, Arab developers, like many others, do try hard to bridge the gap. Edraak is a fork of the edX MOOC platform that added proper UTF-8 and RTL support to edX in the last year or so.
- kps 11y agoIt's a silly statement. Type, composed of little chunks of metal placed adjacent to each other, has a problem with scripts that aren't practically decomposable into little chunks placed adjacent to each other. But that's equally true of ‘western’ cursives and equally false of ‘eastern’ non-cursives, including Semitic scripts like Hebrew and Ethiopic, as well as South Arabian¹, which would have been perfectly suited to type but was displaced by the cursive Arabic script. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Arabian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Arabian_alphabet
- pavel_lishin 11y agoI know nothing about font design; as far as I thought, I assumed that the computer read some given vector data from a font file, and then displayed them, with maybe a bit of logic to take care of things like kerning. How does modern software render fonts that have letters that change drastically based on their position, like Arabic?
- xvilka 11y agoIt is more also a problem of the software to support RTL. For example, I'm using the Linux systems a lot, and love the console interfaces. Sadly only a few terminals has a good support of the RTL + BiDi(rectional text) + Arabic script: mlterm, konsole. Even the gnome terminal has problems with RTL + BiDi. [1] And those are only a small part of the all terminals presented in the *nix world. Compare for example with this list [2], which I made for the tracking support of the True Color (24 bit color). I wish that all of these terminals (which are actively maintained) will have the support of RTL languages in general, and Arabic in particular. [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vte/+bug/263822 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vte/+bug/263822 [2] https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728 https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728
- holmak 11y agoI often think about the strange coincidence that English is the easiest language to represent in a computer. Only 26 characters, with no accents, all independently placed in series. The only awkwardness is the existence of both capital and lowercase. (How much simpler would things be if case-sensitivity wasn't a consideration?) But at least capitalization is one-to-one in English, unlike German's "ss" rule. All this makes it easy to make a keyboard for English typing, too. Every other language and script I can think of is more difficult to handle in software. Perhaps Cyrillic is similarly computer-compatible, but I don't know enough about it to be sure. It is just strangely convenient!
- unsignedint 11y agoSo are fonts for Japanese and Chinese. Font designers have to literally author each letter and there are thousands of them... Fortunately, there are enough interests in Japanese fonts, so there are varieties of them. The problem is that many of them are fairly expensive to license perhaps because of work involved making them. (Thus, most of people use ones come with the OS; in case of OS X, they bundle premium fonts. Japanese government also distributes free fonts,[0]) I don't know the situation for Chinese, but probably similar situation. [0]: http://ipafont.ipa.go.jp/ http://ipafont.ipa.go.jp/