The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

Post by nwhnwh » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 9:43 PM UTC

slibhb wrote: post #30

somat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, English has a joined form(cursive) that is nearly dead because mechanical text assistance devices (first typewriters, now computers) work much better with the block form. While sad in a cultural loss sort of way the joined form only really makes sense when the text is hand written. I am not familiar with the history of Arabic typography, but I sort of assume there was an archaic block form and their curre…

Another wrinkle with Arabic is linguistic conservatism. Due to Islamism and the idea that Arabic is the language of of God (the Quran was written in Arabic by the supposedly illiterate prophet), Arabic has lagged behind other languages in terms of innovation. Hebrew is a closely related semitic language that simply adopted a block and cursive form. It has also been greatly simplified and friendlier towards loanwords,…

Post by slibhb » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 10:06 PM UTC

hackpelican wrote: post #31

slibhb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another wrinkle with Arabic is linguistic conservatism. Due to Islamism and the idea that Arabic is the language of of God (the Quran was written in Arabic by the supposedly illiterate prophet), Arabic has lagged behind other languages in terms of innovation. Hebrew is a closely related semitic language that simply adopted a block and cursive form. It has also been greatly simplified and friendlier towards loanwords,…

Muslims don’t believe Arabic is the language of God. They believe that the Quran was revealed in Arabic (true). Thinking the creator of the heavens and earth only speaks one language is absurd. It also kind of implies that Muslims believe in a superiority of Arabs which is also not true. Weird to say Arabic hasn’t innovated or evolved considering the wild variety of dialects spoken in the modern world. Conflating the…

Post by petesergeant » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 10:52 PM UTC

somat wrote: post #27

amluto wrote: post #10

Is this a small typo? > The relevant rule, W2 of UAX #9, reclassifies a digit as an ARABIC NUMBER if any of the previous strong characters in the paragraph were Arabic letters, and as a EUROPEAN NUMBER otherwise. Both render their internal digits left-to-right, which is correct: numbers everywhere on Earth are read most-significant-first. Does the author mean most-significant-on-the-left? The statement as written is…

This is a thing I have wondered about. are arabic numbers little endian when embeded in arabic text? The text is read right to left. But the numbers are the same as we put them in our left to right text where they are big-endian(read big to small). so are numbers in original arabic little-endian? read small to large. with the interesting side effect that numbers are universal.

Post by gwern » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 12:04 AM UTC

throw-the-towel wrote: post #14

This article is wonderful. It's interesting, it's captivating, full with detail, and to think I never gave much thought about Arabic rendering before. This part nearly had me chuckle audibly: He says yes. The result is "Simplified Arabic": initial fused into medial, final into isolated, ligatures dropped. It conquers the Arab newsroom in a generation. Mrowa is assassinated at his desk eight years later, by an unrelat…

Post by mohamedkoubaa » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 12:32 AM UTC

amdivia wrote: post #44

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #8

I'd like to see some more mainstream usage of disconnected fonts for Arabic, for example like these: https://www.arabaddigital.com/en/article/2100-Quarantining-o...

This was once attempted, and in a way such that each letter needed only one character no matter it's position in the word Unfortunately it died https://worksthatwork.com/6/unified-arabic