
The Beauty Of Typography: Writing Systems And Calligraphy Of The World - danh
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/18/the-beauty-of-typography-writing-systems-and-calligraphy-of-the-world/
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elblanco
<http://www.omniglot.com>

brings me hours of enjoyment.

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purp
Great, now I won't sleep tonight as I learn the difference between syllabic
alphabets and syllabaries. I hate you in the kindest way possible. ;]

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teejae
If you're interested in human languages, another great place on the internet
is:

<http://www.ethnologue.com/>

I've spent countless hours on both Omniglot and Ethnologue.

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purp
Just had to get in on the hate, eh, teejae? Ah, well, I can sleep when I'm
dead.

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callahad
Holy cow, has Smashing always published these sorts of articles, or is this an
outlier? Quite the departure from their often-linked "40 Wordpress Themes!"
posts.

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ilovecomputers
Of course, Smashing always picks the best free lancers to write for them. Even
then, once you get past their list articles, the provide very insightful piece
of writing. Most their best stuff is in their design category. Here's a three
part series on color: [http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/08/color-
theory-for-...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/08/color-theory-for-
designer-part-3-creating-your-own-color-palettes/)

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chime
This was a fascinating and very informative read. I spent many a nights
toiling over the intricacies of the Devanagari script when I was coding
<http://chime.tv/products/hind2000/ss.shtml> as a kid. My biggest take-away
was that combining different characters is pretty much required though
difficult to implement. If you spell "MItI" and then edited it to "MIttI", I
would have to replace the 't' with a special double 'tt' character. Simply
adding another 't' character would not suffice.

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dadadooda
The new convention for happy co-existence with the pared-down font engines
packaged in devices like the iPhone is to use two 't' characters after all,
but add a slanting accent underneath the first 't' (or whatever letter it is)
to indicate that it should only be 'pronounced half'.

It's like Nastaliq's (the Urdu script) jazm character:
<http://users.skynet.be/hugocoolens/newurdu/specials.html>

I think it's a sane move.

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sid0
> The new convention

I don't think the convention of the slanting accent ("virama" or "halant") is
new. I know it's been used in books for at least the last hundred years. This
means that conjoined ligatures aren't strictly necessary, but they're used a
lot in handwriting and IMO look quite beautiful.

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ThomPete
Their best article so far IMHO. Let's get more of this. Articles where you
actually learn something.

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quant18
don't miss the animation in the middle showing how "Al Jazeera" in Naskh
(printed Arabic form) gets transformed into their logo.

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zeynel1
Amazing! Thank you.

