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>Typeface design has a western normativity problem Why does it seem like everything has a western normativity problem? What things have an eastern normativity

by 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 ago
Have you considered the trajectory of history over the last 500 years or so.
- Jimmy 11y ago
  You'll have to enlighten me.
  - Eyas 11y ago
    not 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 ago
It'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
- Eyas 11y ago
  uhm, you do realize South Arabian alphabet was last in active use more than a thousand years ago. It now bears no resemblance to modern Arabic type. At all. I'm reading your argument as suggesting that over a quarter billion Arabic native speakers should have learned a new script? Not sure if that was sarcastic. Either way, if you are making this argument, it is easier for these speakers to learn English instead..
  - kps 11y ago
    The point is that the practicality of movable type for a script has nothing to do with whether or not the script is ‘western’.

by 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 ago

Have you considered the trajectory of history over the last 500 years or so.

Jimmy 11y ago
You'll have to enlighten me.
- Eyas 11y ago
  not 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 ago

It'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

Eyas 11y ago
uhm, you do realize South Arabian alphabet was last in active use more than a thousand years ago. It now bears no resemblance to modern Arabic type. At all. I'm reading your argument as suggesting that over a quarter billion Arabic native speakers should have learned a new script? Not sure if that was sarcastic. Either way, if you are making this argument, it is easier for these speakers to learn English instead..
- kps 11y ago
  The point is that the practicality of movable type for a script has nothing to do with whether or not the script is ‘western’.