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Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font

makkuk.com

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Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font

#21

Post by saljam »

baxter001 wrote: post #5

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?

I'll add to what others mentioned the fact the proper text selection for bidirectional text is awkward at best, and often outright impossible with buggy UIs. Particularly at the border of where the text changes direction.

Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font

#23

Post by blacksmith_tb »

aiaf wrote: post #13
freshyill wrote: post #9

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…

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/ There's a…

!ممتاز I am always disappointed when I try and type something in Arabic on OS X. Now I will install Kawkab-mono and Katib both, and improve matters 200%.

Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font

#24

Post by mahmud »

aiaf wrote: post #10

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,…

So friken beautiful! Ahhh.

Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font

#25

Post by mahmud »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #18

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

It's a Lisp dialect it seems :-)

Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font

#26

Post by 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

Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font

#27

Post by azth »

aiaf wrote: post #10

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,…

جزاك الله خيراً

Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font

#28

Post by moonchrome »

scott_karana wrote: post #2

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!

>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".

Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font

#29

Post by XaspR8d »

okramcivokram wrote: post #15
aiaf wrote: post #10

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,…

I can't read it, but I've noticed the red marks move relative to the glyph when playing with the resize slider: https://youtu.be/CiOg12B6A4g Google Chrome 46.0.2490.71 on Linux

The problem is that the text is actually two identical layers, the tashkil/diacritics residing on an upper layer with a hints-only font and absolute positioning. You can fix it by giving that layer "width: 100%".

Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font

#30

Post by rspeer »

Naomarik wrote: post #19
bitwize wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's perfect.

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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