Help! Is This Arabic? • Hacker News Board

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#271

Post by pradn » Mon, Feb 27, 2023, 4:25 PM UTC

lelandfe wrote: post #250

disintegrator wrote: post #213

Tangentially, for those doing web development, CSS has a bunch of "logical" properties [1] that adapt to the locale of the user agent. For example, you can swap out `margin-left` and `margin-bottom` in your CSS with `margin-inline-start` and `margin-block-end` respectively. Similarly, `text-align` accepts start/end instead of left/right. Even if you're not targetting right-to-left or top-to-bottom locales, it's easy…

Do "top-to-bottom locales" exist? Has anyone built a site with users that get utility out of these? I've usually found that the arguments for these properties revolve around, "well, what if I decide to use traditional Mongolian in the future?," which seems like the biggest case of YAGNI I can think of. I suspect their popularity is owed to tutorial authors showing off their CSS prowess. (I'm also not convinced of the…

Yes! The website of the president of Mongolia has three versions, including one with the traditional top-to-bottom script. It's quite well-designed! You can see web-design features that make sense for this script: the nav-bar being on the left, left-to-right scrolling, and pagination at the right end.

https://president.mn/mng/

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#272

Post by least » Mon, Feb 27, 2023, 4:26 PM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #239

least wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

hold up. Representing a line, two lines, a dot, a circle... in one of several fixed positions relative to the character...that's exactly what a segmented display is good at. I think you may not have got what I meant by "dense". I'm looking at it from a pure information theoretic view. There's something like 5000 Chinese characters overall. Even if I could find a system of on/off segments to represent them all, I woul…

There's certainly a finite set of combinations but in order for you to create a segmented display that isn't just a dot matrix, you need to have few enough variations that it can 1) actually encode all of the characters and their context-specific variations, 2) have segments that at least somewhat resemble the characters they are supposed to represent and 3) if they are overlapping must be able to to render all of the components of every letter distinctly. So If you have a line that you also want to be two or three dots and a hamza or some other diacritic, you need to break each segment down to the lowest common denominators.

A 7-segment display works by turning on and off each of the segments in order to render a glyph that is supposed to represent English alphanumeric characters. It mostly accomplishes this, though just barely and honestly a lot of characters do not render well at all (like the lowercase "i"). How would you shape the segments in such a way that could accomplish at least that level of clarity in Arabic?

I personally think that what you'd end up with would very closely resemble a dot matrix.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#273

Post by AdamN » Mon, Feb 27, 2023, 4:40 PM UTC

jmopp wrote: post #235

AdamN wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2B still seems like a stretch. Can 2B people read (even with low comprehension) a basic paragraph in Arabic? My SWAG would be 1B people.

A quick Google search seems to indicate that there are 1.9 billion Muslims in the world. It makes sense to assume they know enough Arabic to recgonise at the very least common religious set-phrases like the Bismillah or the Shahada. In my book this counts as "some degree of Arabic script literacy"

You'd have to exclude everybody under 7 or so, everybody who is illiterate (in this very expansive sense), and those that are Muslim but do not read Arabic and do everything in translation.

That might be a small group though and probably outweighed by all the non-Muslim Arabic readers (for instance I work with 2 Egyptians, one is Coptic and one is ex-Muslim and both can easily read Arabic).

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#274

Post by jfk13 » Mon, Feb 27, 2023, 4:41 PM UTC

lelandfe wrote: post #270

jfk13 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site of the Office of the President of Mongolia is available in top-to-bottom traditional Mongolian script: https://president.mn/mng/ Other examples (e.g. vertical Japanese) aren't too hard to find: https://nishinokensetsukogyo.co.jp https://ok-maru.jp etc.

We're looking for vertical to horizontal switching . Not just examples of vertical writing. Almost all extant vertically-written languages are more commonly seen horizontally on the web. Vertical Japanese on the web (from my American understanding) is a design choice, and is notably absent from mainstays like https://www.yahoo.co.jp/ That is to say, it is unlikely that a site's language switcher would opt for top-to-…

It's unlikely (I'd guess) that a site would want to offer the exact same page in both horizontal and vertical modes, yes. But it's plausible they might want to share a lot of design elements between horizontal and vertical versions of the content.

Using logical properties would make it easier to have a common base of CSS that controls spacing, sizes, etc., that can be used by both language versions, rather than maintaining them completely separately.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#275

Post by mc32 » Mon, Feb 27, 2023, 4:54 PM UTC

pradn wrote: post #271

lelandfe wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do "top-to-bottom locales" exist? Has anyone built a site with users that get utility out of these? I've usually found that the arguments for these properties revolve around, "well, what if I decide to use traditional Mongolian in the future?," which seems like the biggest case of YAGNI I can think of. I suspect their popularity is owed to tutorial authors showing off their CSS prowess. (I'm also not convinced of the…

Yes! The website of the president of Mongolia has three versions, including one with the traditional top-to-bottom script. It's quite well-designed! You can see web-design features that make sense for this script: the nav-bar being on the left, left-to-right scrolling, and pagination at the right end. https://president.mn/mng/

They should make people turn their monitors vertically oriented --are monitors in MN usually in "portrait" or do they maintain a discrepancy of vertical text but horizontal layout?

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#276

Post by lelandfe » Mon, Feb 27, 2023, 5:02 PM UTC

jfk13 wrote: post #274

lelandfe wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're looking for vertical to horizontal switching . Not just examples of vertical writing. Almost all extant vertically-written languages are more commonly seen horizontally on the web. Vertical Japanese on the web (from my American understanding) is a design choice, and is notably absent from mainstays like https://www.yahoo.co.jp/ That is to say, it is unlikely that a site's language switcher would opt for top-to-…

It's unlikely (I'd guess) that a site would want to offer the exact same page in both horizontal and vertical modes, yes. But it's plausible they might want to share a lot of design elements between horizontal and vertical versions of the content. Using logical properties would make it easier to have a common base of CSS that controls spacing, sizes, etc., that can be used by both language versions, rather than maint…

For finality, I will quote my original comment:

> the arguments for these properties revolve around, "well, what if I decide to use traditional Mongolian in the future?," which seems like the biggest case of YAGNI I can think of

...And even this one close example doesn't use them!

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#277

Post by lelandfe » Mon, Feb 27, 2023, 5:09 PM UTC

pradn wrote: post #271

lelandfe wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do "top-to-bottom locales" exist? Has anyone built a site with users that get utility out of these? I've usually found that the arguments for these properties revolve around, "well, what if I decide to use traditional Mongolian in the future?," which seems like the biggest case of YAGNI I can think of. I suspect their popularity is owed to tutorial authors showing off their CSS prowess. (I'm also not convinced of the…

Yes! The website of the president of Mongolia has three versions, including one with the traditional top-to-bottom script. It's quite well-designed! You can see web-design features that make sense for this script: the nav-bar being on the left, left-to-right scrolling, and pagination at the right end. https://president.mn/mng/

That site is well made. This is a bit pedantic, but if the default for that site is horizontal text, I'm not sure I would call this a "top-to-bottom locale": https://president.mn/

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#278

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, Feb 27, 2023, 5:34 PM UTC

foldr wrote: post #236

Dylan16807 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason for me to care that it's broken is on behalf of the people that can read it. So even though I know a single digit number of words, and you can count me in that two billion, nobody should care about getting it right on my behalf.

>The only reason for me to care that it's broken is on behalf of the people that can read it. The people who can't read it, but who can see that it's broken, will form a lower opinion of your product. It's as if I went to a Polish website and the text was all right-aligned and in all caps. I can't read Polish at all, but I'd still form an opinion about the quality of the site.

I'm not sure if you were trying to disagree with me, but I agree. They will form a lower opinion, but they form that opinion almost entirely because of the people that actually should be able to read it.

If you screw up a language that has 0 readers, it matters far less.

The point of saying how many speakers there are was to increase the strength of that effect. Because of that, it's misleading if you pump up the number. For pumping it up to not matter, the number would have to not matter, and there wouldn't have been a reason to mention it in the first place.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#279

Post by kccqzy » Mon, Feb 27, 2023, 5:52 PM UTC

lelandfe wrote: post #250

disintegrator wrote: post #213

Tangentially, for those doing web development, CSS has a bunch of "logical" properties [1] that adapt to the locale of the user agent. For example, you can swap out `margin-left` and `margin-bottom` in your CSS with `margin-inline-start` and `margin-block-end` respectively. Similarly, `text-align` accepts start/end instead of left/right. Even if you're not targetting right-to-left or top-to-bottom locales, it's easy…

Do "top-to-bottom locales" exist? Has anyone built a site with users that get utility out of these? I've usually found that the arguments for these properties revolve around, "well, what if I decide to use traditional Mongolian in the future?," which seems like the biggest case of YAGNI I can think of. I suspect their popularity is owed to tutorial authors showing off their CSS prowess. (I'm also not convinced of the…

Go to any random bookstore in Taiwan and pick up a book in traditional Chinese. It's top-to-bottom, and right-to-left. The spine of the book is flipped compared with western books: it's on the right side when the cover is facing up.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#280

Post by gkfasdfasdf » Mon, Feb 27, 2023, 6:43 PM UTC

IncRnd wrote: post #19

gkfasdfasdf wrote: post #8

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...

Most Muslims are taught how to read Arabic script, even if they can't understand or speak Arabic. That is because reading the Qur'an in its Arabic form, even without understanding, is a sacred act above reading the translation. Additionally, ritual prayers require reciting verses in Arabic, (again without necessarily understanding). Therefore it's not weird to assume the number of people familiar with Arabic script include the population of non-Arabic speaking Muslims.