
Harir – Reducing Noise in Arabic Script - flannery
https://www.typotheque.com/articles/harir
======
LanceH
For comparison, I just pulled up
[http://arabic.cnn.com/](http://arabic.cnn.com/)

The headlines are a bit stylized and difficult to read as I'm not familiar
with the font. Getting accustomed to a font is either more difficult in
Arabic, or there are greater extremes in fonts -- I've never figured out
which. Certainly I have to learn a new style of writing every time I read a
hand written letter.

Most of the text on cnn's site is easier to read but feels mechanical compared
to the harir font which feels like a significant improvement.

Harir is very easy to read, with few peculiarities. I don't claim to know
fonts or which is better/worse, but I would say Harir is very good, at least
for my sample size of one. You would have to ask a native speaker who might be
more comfortable with script than type their opinion.

~~~
gotchange
I don't like the Arabic font used on CNN either. I don't know why they used
such an inelegant font for everything on their website, it looks very
ridiculous and unfriendly to the eyes.

I have better examples that you might find interesting:

\- [http://www.madamasr.com](http://www.madamasr.com) $$ Give it some time for
the webfont to load $$

\- [http://www.dw.com/ar/](http://www.dw.com/ar/)

\- [http://www.bbc.com/persian](http://www.bbc.com/persian)

~~~
vowelless
I am not a fan of the cnn font but I don't see Harir as a major improvement
(it's too thick). The BBC and dw fonts look the most natural to me. Al Jazeera
([http://www.aljazeera.net/portal](http://www.aljazeera.net/portal)) is also
very readable.

~~~
jacobolus
All the examples of the Harir typeface from this post are the bold and bold
caption fonts. Do you also think the regular and display regular fonts are too
thick?
[https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/harir/regular/sample/arabic...](https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/harir/regular/sample/arabic/12?s=webfonts)
[https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/harir/display_regular/sampl...](https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/harir/display_regular/sample/arabic/36?s=webfonts)

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donatj
I find it exceedingly interesting how Latin is so easily and often broken down
into simple geometric shapes, whereas things like Arabic and Chinese when
digitized still try to emulate the subtleties of brush strokes.

~~~
mkaziz
There's folks who maintain that's why Europe entered the Industrial Revolution
way before people out East did - non-Latin languages didn't take too kindly to
be broken up into the pieces that could be used on a printing press!

~~~
Cyph0n
That's quite an interesting theory. Do you have any good books on the topic?

~~~
jerf
One of the better discussions of this is probably in
[http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-
th...](http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-the-ipod/) ,
which makes a much weaker claim about the 8-bit era of computing in
particular, which I'd think is easier to discuss for a lot of reasons.

One other point I'd make is that I think people may be accidentally
overestimating the friendliness of English for printing, to some degree,
because sometimes it sounds like that people think that Japanese, Arabic, or
whathaveyou people are just completely unwilling to make any practical
concessions to the fact that technology might have some problems reproducing
their language. But it's not as if English was not itself compromised by
technology.

How much of this discussion sounds like "No English-speaking country would use
a typewriter because English is written with a different amount of space
allocated to each letter, which typewriters of the era could not reproduce."?
English speakers adapted to the tech. Telegrams historically looked like
crap... they couldn't even have _punctuation!_... but they were popular even
so.

Granted, English may have a particularly easy time of it (it is, admittedly,
quite nice to fit a quite usable subset of your language into five bits), but
I'd like to see some more concrete evidence that all these other cultures were
unwilling to bend for a while, because they were so much more concerned
about... whatever it is they were concerned about.

(Also, to be clear, I'm speaking about day-to-day usage. Being particular
about the Koran is one thing, being unwilling to bend in an text message on
your 1998 phone is quite another.)

~~~
Cyph0n
> One other point I'd make is that I think people may be accidentally
> overestimating the friendliness of English for printing

I don't think so to be frank. When compared to Japanese or Arabic, once could
say English was created solely for printing. I'm a native Arabic speaker, so I
can appreciate why people would claim it's a difficult language to print. Word
processors and some browsers, to this very day, sometimes have trouble
rendering Arabic properly, especially when it comes to linking characters and
Arabic punctuation.

> Telegrams historically looked like crap... they couldn't even have
> punctuation!.

English punctuation does not significantly alter meaning in my opinion. You
have sentence-ending punctuation, which is used to differentiate mainly
between a statement and a question. Then you have separator punctuation, like
commas, semi-colons, and colons. I don't see them making much of a change
either. And finally, the apostrophe and quotation mark. In addition, telegrams
are short messages, so there usually is no need to convey complex meanings.
Therefore, it would have been a slight inconvenience for telegram users at
most.

In Arabic, changing a punctuation mark above a single letter in a word can
change the word's meaning entirely. Furthermore, letters are linked together
to form words - this is not essential, but would make things much more
difficult to read. Also, the position of a letter in a word dictates its
"shape". This introduces a ton of variation to the letters of the language,
making it difficult for even modern keyboards to get right. I'd imagine it
would have been even more complex at the beginning.

Of course, I think that the main barrier to widespread adoption of the
printing press in the Arab World was more related to demand than anything
else. At the time of the Industrial Revolution and slightly before it, the
Arab countries' least concern was printing books, as they were too busy
dealing with the imperialist occupation.

~~~
belovedeagle
> letters are linked ... get right.

That whole section applies equally well to many written forms of English. I'm
not an expert but I think modern Latin "print" forms (i.e., the only forms an
increasing number of Anglophones can read or write, aside from very similar
modern italic) are as much a product of the limitations of the printing press
as anything. Look at the archaic forms of the letter /s/ for a start.

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jlev
Beautiful font! I can't read the language, but have done some software work in
the middle east, and Harir looks much cleaner to my eye than the helvetica
knock-offs in arabic.

If you want a real challenge in il8n, try ensuring that all the ligatures are
correct in generated PDFs.

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finance-geek
I think a great test for the font would be to have Quran readers read the
Quran with it, and perhaps test their speed. It is a pretty good benchmark. I
have a HUGE problem with reading the Quran electronically because i'm used to
the Indo-Pak script and become almost illiterate when reading the traditional
Arabic script. Unfortunately most electronic materials are in the traditional
Arabic script.

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dfc
Does "elementary school" mean something other than school for 5-11 year olds
in other countries? I am having trouble imagining 10 year old me being
concerned with a font's "inelegant spacing and minimal kerning."

~~~
1ris
As I understand it, this is not "somewhat unpleasant" or something a pedant
would notice, but absolutely horrible.

Most elementary students would notice and dislike kerning like this
[https://static.flickr.com/55/134612871_dd482da6a2_o.gif](https://static.flickr.com/55/134612871_dd482da6a2_o.gif)
.

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2pointsomone
Incredible!

