5 ms·
> Indic scripts go far beyond this by needing to treat entire consonant clusters as single rendered glyphs. FWIW, Arabic does this too, just that most default
by Manishearth 9y ago
> Indic scripts go far beyond this by needing to treat entire consonant clusters as single rendered glyphs.
FWIW, Arabic does this too, just that most default Arabic fonts don't. https://www.google.com/get/noto/#nastaliq-aran https://www.google.com/get/noto/#nastaliq-aran contains a bunch of specialized ligatures (and is overall a very complicated font).
I always say: There's a reason a lot of the folks working on font shaping are Persian/Arabic speakers :)
- jcranmer 9y agoI didn't know about Arabic having more ligatures than a few common ones (e.g., Allah). That said, there's a reason that I want to learn Arabic.
- Manishearth 9y agoYeah, the common ones are lam-alif showing لا , and alif-lam-lam-heh showing الله . But for example خ/ح/چ at the end of a word often form cool ligatures, and the dots on ب/پ/ت often go to interesting places, and سے forms a cool ligature where it uses the other form of the bari yeh and the س forms little teeth marks up top. (Some of these are Urdu-specific; I can read regular Arabic but I have more experience trying to read Urdu calligraphy) Arabic calligraphy can be pretty involved.