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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

61–70 of 304 posts

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#61
>Bonus 'I hate it' points if it's that Arabic-looking font that's just English text that looks kind of Arabic.

There's a faux-katakana font someone used for the titles on an otherwise amazing album of some FM synth Touhou remixes[0] that hardcore fucks with my brain.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24x3AL7yMX0

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#62
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole 'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim Not a weird claim at all. Even without harakat, it is obvious when Arabic script is messed up (via alignment or letter reversal) to anyone who can read the script. It just makes whatever you are reading look janky and unprofessional.

It's weird, because the number is off by an order of magnitude. "If you count all of the varieties of today’s Arabic together, you can safely estimate that there are about 313 million Arabic speakers in the whole world, making it the fifth most-spoken language globally behind Mandarin, Spanish, English and Hindi." [1] [1] https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-many-people-speak-ara...

The writer most likely count the moslem population. Most moslem don't speak arabic but they recite quran (written in arabic) daily. Most of them will notice if a ال written as ل ا

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#63

This website is well-meaning, but will be difficult to parse if you don't have elementary Arabic and can't tell apart ال from ل ا. What it really needs is a simple reference input string, examples of how it gets broken, and what to do to fix them. The middle case, where the sentence is correctly rendered RTL but the individual words are LTR (breaking the ligatures), is particularly common and insidious because it loo…

If you can’t tell the difference between a stylized lJ and Jl you probably didn’t end up on that page to begin with.

I don’t think that is an unreasonable assumption on the reader

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#64
post #22

This website is well-meaning, but will be difficult to parse if you don't have elementary Arabic and can't tell apart ال from ل ا. What it really needs is a simple reference input string, examples of how it gets broken, and what to do to fix them. The middle case, where the sentence is correctly rendered RTL but the individual words are LTR (breaking the ligatures), is particularly common and insidious because it loo…

I actually thought that part was perfectly clear. > In general, the letter combination ال should be common. So if your text has more than a few words, you should be able to look though your text and see that somewhere. I can't read Arabic but I can recognize that pattern. I went to https://www.bbc.com/arabic and could find numerous occurrences. It's a bit like saying "if you have a paragraph in 'English' and it has n…

> It's a bit like saying "if you have a paragraph in 'English' and it has no e's in it, it's probably not English."

For the exception, see

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#66
This reminds me of an Arabic client who wanted both English and Arabic version of the app. I sent him a spreadsheet with 2 cols, with English on one column, and another empty column where I expected him to fill the Arabic translation.

He replied with a plaint .txt file with a couple of Arabic lines in it, with a message saying "I translated some of those text from your excel sheet, please go ahead and use this text, I will send the rest by tomorrow". Nobody understood which translated to which.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#69
post #41
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there an arabic equiv of a 7 segment display? A 7 segment display would have nowhere close to enough resolution to properly render Arabic script. Digital signage would at least be using a low-resolution LED matrix but more likely you'd see LED/LCD displays in places that are affluent and plain analog signage where they are not.

I could understand if this were a non-alphabet system like Chinese where the information coding is that dense per character. But for an alphabet system, why the mismatch between the bits of information per character and the bits needed to visually represent that character? The Latin alphabet mostly fits on a 7 seg display, and 26 letters requires a theoretical minimum of 5 bits to encode, so the graphical efficiency…

Because the information coding is dense. Arabic script has a lot of tiny shapes that indicate what letter it is and it also has diacritic marks, which on their own are similarly intricate and small. You can't represent one line, two lines, a dot, a circle, a hamza, etc. above, below, to the side of particular characters, without a lot of resolution.
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