
Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font - specifictso
http://makkuk.com/kawkab-mono/
======
aiaf
The font's designer here- glad you guys like it!

I wasn't ready to put this up on HN because I didn't have an English page yet,
but @specifictso has gone ahead and posted it.

The font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License as mentioned.

There's less than 10 Arabic monospaced typefaces out there and Kawkab Mono
comes to fill a gap in this area. Might not be as highly demanded as Latin
monospaced fonts, but still, it's great to have variety.

This is very much beta software as I haven't really tested the font outside of
my personal setup. I've had no type design experience prior to this project.
Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

~~~
sandworm101
It's been a long time since I tried to read right-to-left. The red isn't
really more of a pink on my screen. Is that a choice? I always like how true
red jumped out.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Red and blue on black make for pretty cool 3D effects. I noticed it when
playing with colors in terminal.

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omarish
Beautiful! So much more readable than the other Arabic fonts I've seen in the
past.

This is a little far fetched, but I think is a huge win for society. Better
Arabic fonts = easier Arabic-only speakers to do work online = more
opportunity for a huge portion of the world.

~~~
aiaf
The Arabic type design community is already tiny, but there's a good number of
really beautiful and well-designed Arabic fonts out there, and equally
talented designers. My font here doesn't really even compare, it's an
amateur's work.

Examples
[http://www.sakkal.com/type/index.html](http://www.sakkal.com/type/index.html)
[http://www.amirifont.org/](http://www.amirifont.org/)
[http://www.29letters.com/](http://www.29letters.com/)
[https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/arabic](https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/arabic)
And also check out the Arabic fonts published by Monotype

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freshyill
Out of curiosity, what text editors work well with Arabic these days? A few
years back, when Textmate was still very popular, I had to sometimes do i18n
work. I had a coworker for a different department who was a native Arabic
speaker, who would help me out, but together we still struggled. We'd put the
cursor where an edit needed to be made, and changes would appear elsewhere. It
took lots of trial-and-error to get the work done. Are things better these
days?

~~~
aiaf
It's very hit and miss in terms of code editors. For example Sublime Text has
no complex text shaping at all. It actually renders Arabic as disjointed
letters.

The JetBrains series of IDEs have some Arabic support, in the sense that the
text is rendered properly at least.

I made an Arabic Markdown editor for the Mac last year, so that personally
helps me when I need to edit Arabic text
[http://katibapp.com/](http://katibapp.com/)

There's a lot left to be done for Arabic. So much low-hanging fruit.

~~~
bitwize
Emacs claims support for Arabic editing. How is this in practice?

~~~
Naomarik
It's perfect.

~~~
rspeer
Can you go into more detail?

In particular, can Emacs deal with cases where the Unicode RTL algorithm gives
nonsense, such as editing HTML in Arabic?

(Because HTML tags are made of punctuation, Roman letters, and attribute
values that could be in any language, you can end up with LTR segments that
may include half a tag and some adjacent text. At that point you can't even
see visually what they include; you have to reason out what Unicode is doing.
You might even end up with a tag that begins with an open angle bracket that
looks like > and ends with a closing angle bracket that also looks like >.)

I ask this not as someone who knows any Arabic, but someone who has to deal
with the _results_ of complexities of text such as RTL formatting. To make
mixed-direction text editing "perfect", someone would have to put a lot of
task-specific design into it.

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unknownzero
Wow, this really shows off how pretty Arabic looks. I can't read a word of it
but I really appreciate the aesthetics of the language and it's unfortunate it
always gets mucked up in digital format.

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msoad
There is a shortage in monospace fonts for Arabic script. Thank you so much
for this! It's beautiful. Under what license this is published?

~~~
tschuy
It appears to be under the SIL Open Font License:
[http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=...](http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=OFL)

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TazeTSchnitzel
This would be great for قلب! It's an Arabic programming language:
[http://nas.sr/%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A8/](http://nas.sr/%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A8/)

(repl here: [http://qlb-repl.herokuapp.com/](http://qlb-repl.herokuapp.com/))

If you don't speak Arabic (like me, for now :<), you might have to look at the
source code to figure out how to use it. :)

~~~
mahmud
It's a Lisp dialect it seems :-)

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baxter001
Are there more basic string operations that need to be available for Arabic, a
quick play with copy and paste produces all sorts of unusual effects I assume
because of combining marks not being copied or being suitable in their new
contexts.

I'd assume that the text is modified in units more complex than substrings and
whitespace splitting?

~~~
leviathan
Letters in Arabic have different rendering depending on where they lie in the
word; at the start, middle, end, or following/preceding certain characters.

This is the main problem you see sometimes in movies where they try to show
something in Arabic and they get the rendering wrong. They probably get each
letter on its own and try to construct the words like that, where the letters
do not join and the whole thing looks like a mess.

~~~
_delirium
Fwiw, Greek also has one letter (sigma) that differs in rendering depending on
where in the word it appears. It's the same letter, it's just that when it
appears word-final, it looks different. But Unicode decided to split it into
two codepoints, rather than treat it as a rendering issue. Therefore rendering
of Greek codepoints never depends on position within the word, even though
rendering of Greek _letters_ can. Instead it's up to the user to make sure
that whenever a lowercase sigma appears word-final, it should be encoded with
a different codepoint, GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA (U+03C2), 'ς', rather
than the usual codepoint, GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA (U+03C3), 'σ'.

------
scott_karana
I can't read Arabic, but it's great that the internationalization of modern
programming languages and editors allows for this.

Sure, statements are still in English in most languages, but it must feel
great to be able to write comments in your own language!

~~~
moonchrome
>but it's great that the internationalization of modern programming languages
and editors allows for this.

Having to juggle languages inside of my head while also deciphering code just
creates unnecessary problems (don't know about you but I always need to
"switch context" because I'm thinking in some language) - also there's the
problem you have to learn double terminology and in reality few actually use
the localized terms, they just mix in English ones - this makes talking about
programming awkward because English terms sounds weird when you apply
contextual rules for words, and (thankfully) nobody actually uses the
translated terminology.

I don't believe you can be a good programmer without knowing English - most
existing code/resources are in English and it's the language in which new
developments are created and this is an industry with very fast innovation
cycle.

Also we live in a global economy with multinational teams - why make things
more complicated for everyone by using non-standard languages ? Sure the
choice of English is arbitrary and it might not be a perfect choice but it's
what we have and there's no good reason to change it.

I've seen some places (government related) mandate which language must be used
but I would not call this "great".

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akamel
This is very nice; and easy to read... one of my main qualms with Arabic fonts
has been their jaggedness. The evenness of this font will not only make code
and comments look beautiful; but also the web!

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ionforce
I don't know Arabic but I'm very glad work like this is being done.

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gotchange
Good job ِAbdullah.

The font looks amazing and easy and comfortable on the eyes. Let us know when
you will publish it on GitHub so we could contribute more to this seed project
and expand it even further.

Congrats to you again

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azernik
So pretty!

IMO, the variable connector width in Arabic script seems to make letterforms
less distorted compared to the variable-width letterforms than in Western
scripts.

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Salamat
Awesome font, will try it in Arabic Adobe CS6 inDesign, but for webpages, I
think the browser will fall back to default fonts (in Chrome/Firefox)
regardless of the actual webpage fonts.

