The whole 'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim. Maybe it's possible, but there aren't two billion people with functional Arabic literacy. Most Arabic is written without small vowels (harakat). You could have script that is justified right-to-left and with letters correctly connected and it still be gibberish. And many of those 'two billion people' would be none the wiser.
>'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim.
Not really, because
>there aren't two billion people with functional Arabic literacy.
isn’t something that the author claimed. “To some degree” is a phrase that explicitly states that the author isn’t talking about full functional literacy.
It would be a super weird claim if “some degree” and “full functional literacy” meant the same thing, but they don’t! You would almost have to intentionally ignore the meaning of the words the author used and invent a nonexistent overlap of meaning to become confused on this point!
> a simple reference input string, examples of how it gets broken, and what to do to fix them. I really like this idea. Just have a standard set of strings covering all edge cases (even the sprawling labyrinth that is bidi) with a visual reference that shows how the correct rendering of each string would look like. Each entry would also have a description of the problem and suggested solutions. Unlike the solutions i…
I'm not sure I understand the idea. It sounds insane to me because I feel like there's probably trillions of combinations (and it would be insane to expect to be able to cover every specific example of incorrect text), and I thought the website was pretty clear and provided good examples.
As I understand it, the idea is just to make an Arabic test suite with enough examples (maybe a few dozen to a few hundred) such that if your program correctly renders all those examples, it’ll probably work fine with most Arabic text found in the wild. It sounds like there’s a lot of very broken software out there. Testing any Arabic input would be a big improvement for a lot of software.
Crazy how there’s “two billion people” who can read Arabic and seemingly 0 of them are making serious contributions to Arabic text rendering except this one specific guy. Weird.
There is 99% chance the software you are reading text on right now uses HarfBuzz to lay out the text, a library written mainly by a Persian person.
> to almost 2 billion people. There are probably 350 million Arabic speakers.
I was under the impression that Muslims were meant to be able to read the Qur’an phonetically, or at least the first chapter.
Many (most?) Muslims will have memorised the first chapter, and probably at least the last three chapters of the Qur'an. Reading isn't a requirement however, many children (Arabs and non-Arabs) will memorise those chapters verbally well before they learn how to read.
What about farsi and other languages that use arabic script but not arabic at all? I can write (with effort lol) indonesian or javanese in arabic script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawi_script .
Farsi has the letter "p" which Arabic does not. That letter has three dots on top (sometimes drawn like ^. I think there may be another. Arabic only has the "sh" sound with the three dots. Trying to read Farsi, it feels like I should know what's going on but am left with the feeling that I've forgotten all my Arabic. Then I'll see some of the bonus letters.
> Trying to read Farsi
Wait till you discover Urdu, which confuses Farsi speakers even more. For extra fun try the Nastaliq script.
As an Arabic speaker, baby steps! For spoken Arabic, a decent placeholder is either MSA (standard Arabic) or a generally understood dialect (Egyptian or Levantine). The latter is what a lot of the recent Arabic game dubs have been doing (e.g., Ubisoft). Another example: Pixar and Disney use Egyptian Arabic for their dubs. Edit: Oh, and for written Arabic, you should almost always be using MSA. That is, you shouldn’t…
I pity the poor dev who has a Moroccan co-worker that helpfully offers to translate their application into darija thinking it’s Arabic
Tangent: I hate how Moroccans monopolized the word darija to mean "Moroccan Arabic". Every country in North Africa calls their own language darija!
> I hope this will you help in case you cannot afford to hire anyone at all with a elementary school level of Arabic script reading. Oops.
That is probably in the top 3 most common English typos, made millions or billions of times a day by native English speakers, up to and including people with PhDs. The issue the author is complaining about is completely different.
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…
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