The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

Post by decimalenough » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 11:50 AM UTC

simonask wrote: post #65

ibn-ashraf wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, your comment comes off as a bit ignorant and rude. A few points: Firstly, the Qur'an wasn't written by the Prophet, he would dictate it and it would be written by his scribes. Secondly, it's hard to argue that Islam has had a negative effect on Arabic or caused it to lag behind. In fact, it's easy to argue for the opposite. It's a historical fact that the Arabic language developed and proliferat…

I don’t think anybody said that Arabic has suffered a complete standstill, and it has doubtlessly evolved significantly. But if you compare it with basically any other major language, it’s clearly much, much more conservative. If you are a native English speaker, understanding English from 1,000 years ago is like learning a completely different language. If you are a native speaker of Italian, you cannot understand a…

Post by slibhb » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC

decimalenough wrote: post #71

simonask wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think anybody said that Arabic has suffered a complete standstill, and it has doubtlessly evolved significantly. But if you compare it with basically any other major language, it’s clearly much, much more conservative. If you are a native English speaker, understanding English from 1,000 years ago is like learning a completely different language. If you are a native speaker of Italian, you cannot understand a…

There is no one "Arabic". Yes, formal modern Arabic (fusha) is based on (but not identical to) the classical Arabic of the Quran, but nobody speaks this in real life. The actual Arabics are the 20-odd spoken languages, many of which are effectively different languages at this point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic A rough equivalent in both time and space is how the Vatican continues to use Latin, b…

Post by anal_reactor » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 3:53 PM UTC

amake wrote: post #74

anal_reactor wrote: post #64

To me it sounds like it's high time Arabic got a new script that's compatible with computers. I've seen some Lebanese people use mix of Latin letters and digits to type, so the idea isn't entirely stupid.

Computers are tools that exist to serve humans. Humans should never be asked to become subservient to computers. Your suggestion is ludicrous and risible.

Post by jrdres » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

qingcharles wrote: post #57

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)

Post by qingcharles » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 10:25 PM UTC

raphlinus wrote: post #66

qingcharles wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Arab…

I love this question. Basically all scripts have things that make them challenging to render, sometimes little things, sometimes bigger ones. Cyrillic for Russian is reasonably straightforward, but it's also used for many other languages. The variation in style is particularly notable for Bulgarian[1]. A sophisticated font might have a "loca" table with locale-specific adjustments, but this is not universal yet, for…