
Why It's So Hard to Design Arabic Typefaces - qzervaas
http://www.wired.com/2015/10/why-its-so-hard-to-design-arabic-typefaces/
======
Mimick
I'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.

~~~
scrollaway
> "glowed?"

"Glued" was the word you were looking for, "attached" or "connected" is the
word you actually _are_ looking for. It's a familiar concept to anyone who's
written in cursive, which would include most of western europe actually
(though in latin-alphabet cursive scripts, letters don't change that much
based on their position, just the connection).

~~~
pluma
We used to have the long-s (ſ) as a special variant but I think that went out
of style a hundred years ago. In German it's mostly seen in old Fraktur texts,
so these days it's still sometimes found in newspaper logos set in Fraktur --
incidentally, contrary to what most people seem to think, the nazis actually
tried to get rid of Fraktur and Sütterlin (the handwriting style at the time),
there was just a lot of old signage around during WW2, which is why it has
entered popular culture as "that weird typeface the nazis used".

German still has an sz-ligature (ß), but like the Dutch ij-ligature that has
actually ceased to be considered a ligature and become an actual character
(which is why the ij-ligature in Dutch sometimes appears as ÿ or Ü and why you
never see German sz-ligatures separated into the actual letters "s" and "z"
\-- in fact, the ligature is instead rendered as "ss" if it can not be printed
as a ligature and actually resembles an ss-ligature in most fonts, maybe
except for Berlin road signs, which also sport a tz ligature).

Oh, and, because I grew up with computers I never adopted proper cursive
handwriting and to this day still write in a slurred print without connectors
(which is probably why it took me ages to develop a distinct signature).

~~~
bluerobotcat
As a native Dutch speaker I would disagree with what you wrote about the
'ij'-ligature. It's definitely not considered a single letter and I don't
recall ever seeing it written as 'ÿ' or 'Ü'.

~~~
antientropic
I was definitely taught to write it as a single letter, and that seems to be
fairly traditional:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_%28digraph%29#/media/File:L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_%28digraph%29#/media/File:Leesplankje_van_Hoogeveen_%282%29.png)

~~~
bluerobotcat
Those combinations are phonemes, nothing more.

Addendum: The letters 'i' and 'j' look distinct (though very close) to me in
that image. At first I thought it was just weird 'kerning', but the caption
seems to say it's a single glyph. That doesn't need to mean it's a single
letter though; it can merely be a ligature.

Upon further reflection, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by being
thought to write them as a single letter. I was only thought cursive in school
and I'm not sure what difference it would make to write them as one or two
letters in cursive.

------
msoad
To 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
For the curious, [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismillah_ar-Rahman,_ar-
Rahe...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismillah_ar-Rahman,_ar-Raheem)

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
Does 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.

~~~
gotchange
Theoretically, 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.

------
xvilka
It 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)

------
chris_wot
So 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)

------
martiuk
I 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)

------
holmak
I 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
So 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/)

------
pavel_lishin
I 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?

~~~
akx
In OpenType, via the GSUB table.
[https://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/gsub.htm](https://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/gsub.htm)

------
sandGorgon
another 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))

------
Jimmy
>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?

~~~
kps
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
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
The point is that the practicality of movable type for a script has nothing to
do with whether or not the script is ‘western’.

