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The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

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Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#51

Post by dhosek »

samat wrote: post #38

I feel so sorry for Arabs now, just read that paragraph about everyday experience of trying to write English-Arabic text in the mail or any other editor. > I have watched senior engineers, fluent in both Arabic and English, give up on writing a long email in Outlook on a Wednesday afternoon because the cursor would not behave, and switch to Arabic-only or English-only because the cognitive cost of fighting the editor…

The complexities of mixed LR and RL text are quite astonishing since it’s not really even a case of just switching modes when switching scripts since double-nested (or more) texts can change the semantics of line breaks. This article provides a good overview: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb08-1/tb17knutmix.pdf [1]

In college [2], when I wanted to quote some texts from Exodus in Hebrew in a paper that I wrote, I ended up avoiding the issue by hand-reversing the letter order and manually breaking lines. 8 bits is insufficient to cover all the possible combinations of letters and vowel markings so the font didn’t include any vowel markings and only did dageshim for בּ and פּ if I recall correctly.

⸻

1. As an aside, it would have been really nice if Unicode provided a R-L mirrored Latin alphabet to make it easier for monolingual developers to grasp the complexities surrounding mixed directional typesetting. I suppose it could still be added, although Unicode tends towards conservatism on adding additional characters.

2. This was 1990, well before Unicode in the era of a hundred or so 8-bit character encodings, most of which were not implemented widely. I also had to type the text using the arbitrary ASCII-Hebrew mapping of the font I was using which, among other things, led me to discover that letter frequency in Hebrew is much more uniform than it is in English.

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#52

Post by dhosek »

nagaiaida wrote: post #28
retrac wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Latin and Chinese have been modified by the technology used to write them. When carved in stone the lines are much straighter. When written with brush or pen they became semi-cursive. When printing was introduced, they became grid-like and regular. What westerners who are passingly familiar would think of as the standard Chinese typeface - the strict square grid with straight-line characters - arises in part fro…

what selective pressures against oldstyle numerals with ascenders/descenders existed that wouldn't have equally applied to letterforms with those same features? (aha i have found the answer to my own question: miniaturization for fractions in phototypesetting)

Not really. The selective pressure really comes well before that: Tabular presentation of numbers, whether that was log/trig tables or railroad time tables, there was a preference for uniform-width and regular height characters for those contexts (this is also why there is a number-width parameter in TT typography to enable a designer to let digits be variable-width in text but still allow tabular setting if desired).

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#53

Post by dhosek »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #50
nagaiaida wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what selective pressures against oldstyle numerals with ascenders/descenders existed that wouldn't have equally applied to letterforms with those same features? (aha i have found the answer to my own question: miniaturization for fractions in phototypesetting)

the other part is that numbers and symbols were very much not the priority. The printing press was for books, magazines etc. math remained hand written until the computer

Nope, not at all. Monotype had a special system for doing math in hot metal typesetting. With handset type it was possible, but very time-consuming. You can find typeset mathematics going back centuries before the computer. There were also (somewhat impractical) systems for setting music with metal type although engraving was more common because of the interactions of lines and symbols.

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#54

Post by dhosek »

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,…

Also worth noting that unlike Arabic and Islam, the Jewish tradition is that Hebrew is in fact the language of God and was the pre-Babel language.

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#55

Post by wodenokoto »

somat wrote: post #24
evmar wrote: post #15

One thing I sometimes think about when I think about text layout problems is how the text we use also has a bunch of complexities that we can take for granted. Think of variable width characters and kerning and ligatures and hyphenation and justification. Imagine computers had been won by a CJK language, which have none of these problems. You could imagine a similar article about how exotic and difficult English layo…

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…

Looking at dictionaries and printing presses from China before the invention of computers reveals that they probably would have done something similar to ascii, just with more bits to encompass all the characters.

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#56

Post by qingcharles »

samat wrote: post #38

I feel so sorry for Arabs now, just read that paragraph about everyday experience of trying to write English-Arabic text in the mail or any other editor. > I have watched senior engineers, fluent in both Arabic and English, give up on writing a long email in Outlook on a Wednesday afternoon because the cursor would not behave, and switch to Arabic-only or English-only because the cognitive cost of fighting the editor…

I was lucky enough to date someone from the Gulf, so I forced myself to understand and read Arabic scripts (but not understand the text), which is a huge bonus when creating multi-lingual designs.

I already had a good understand of CJK scripts, and you'll come across RtL there, with things like tategaki which is both vertical and RtL at the same time (and can include quotes in other languages such as English and Arabic). Here's some lyrics I made in that format for reference:

https://codepen.io/kingcharlesone/pen/GgRXLoM

What peculiarities does Cyrillic text have? I've never learned to convert Cyrillic to Latin.

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#57

Post by qingcharles »

evmar wrote: post #15

One thing I sometimes think about when I think about text layout problems is how the text we use also has a bunch of complexities that we can take for granted. Think of variable width characters and kerning and ligatures and hyphenation and justification. Imagine computers had been won by a CJK language, which have none of these problems. You could imagine a similar article about how exotic and difficult English layo…

CJK languages can include vertical and RtL stretches too, to complicate matters. Here's some lyrics I made as a test:

https://codepen.io/kingcharlesone/pen/GgRXLoM

Japanese magazines usually mix three different script types on a majority of the pages like this:

https://imgur.com/a/x61XbIV

(In another quirk some Japanese mags open right-bound, others open left-bound)

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#58

Post by qingcharles »

kqr wrote: post #35

This explains a lot of why I think Arabic looks so beautiful on the page. I also love the way it can sound when spoken. Shame I don't have reason good enough to take the years I would need to learn it.

It's funny -- I hate the way Arabic sounds when spoken, even though I agree it looks pretty. To my ears French and Japanese sound the nicest.

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#59

Post by qingcharles »

petesergeant wrote: post #45
somat wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding is that It Depends, but also feast your eyes on this photo I took, which was very confusing to me: https://imgur.com/a/jL8lfZ1

That's a great example of the problem :)

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#60

Post by qingcharles »

I could write all day about how badly RtL languages are treated on electronic devices. Most interfaces just slop RtL text into an interface that is otherwise the totally wrong way around.

One thing that amuses me is that people share these "safe zone" templates for short form video to make sure your content isn't hidden behind the buttons:

https://imgur.com/a/MrIQZen

But look over the shoulder of someone using the Arabic version of TikTok and you'll realize how flawed that is:

https://imgur.com/a/5iLXd2o

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