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The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

lr0.org

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

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, thank you for this response. This is actually fascinating and frustrating at the same time. So Bulgarian uses the same Unicode points, but also uses the language/culture metadata to let the font know which set to use. I'm building out a multi-lingual wiki and just about to start adding Cyrillic support, and this really helps me understand that there is more research I need to do to support other Cyrillic languag…

Any time, friend. Your basic move is to set the lang metadata accurately and choose a font that does have these style differences implemented in the loca table. Best of luck and feel free to reach out if you have more specific questions.

So I went to check on the font that I'd chosen for my European/Latin/Cyrillic body text, and I guess I got very lucky with my pick:

https://github.com/googlefonts/literata

I'm already strict with marking the html pages with the correct lang and culture tags etc, but I'll be double-checking everything now. Thank you again for educating me :)

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

#82
post #47

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…

> Also, it's depressing how hundreds of millions of people couldn't even get their language typeset on a computer, and our industry meanwhile was busy building AI-native AI for your groceries (have we mentioned it has AI btw?) and similar performative bullshit. AI also brought you this "wonderful" article, I would note.

What? This is one of the most clearly human written articles I could imagine. Can you explain what you mean?

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

#83
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah cool then enjoy your text being broken

Enjoy being a slave to a machine, I guess?

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

#84
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah cool then enjoy your text being broken

Enjoy being a slave to a machine, I guess?

The ability to adapt to changing environment is one of core properties of life. You cannot un-invent the printing press. Imagine making an argument "nooooo you cannot print books, it takes away the human element" and then "nooooo you cannot write down stories, it takes away the human element" and then being obliberated by a civilization that embraced new inventions instead of rejecting them based on "no means no".

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

#85
post #82
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, it's depressing how hundreds of millions of people couldn't even get their language typeset on a computer, and our industry meanwhile was busy building AI-native AI for your groceries (have we mentioned it has AI btw?) and similar performative bullshit. AI also brought you this "wonderful" article, I would note.

What? This is one of the most clearly human written articles I could imagine. Can you explain what you mean?

No, it's not. (As should not be a surprise given how extensively LLMs are used to draft English-language articles these days.) It's actually incredibly blatant. Just look at this second paragraph:

> The same six months I had closed three other tickets against the same product, each of which had presented to its filer as the only bug. A customer's name had appeared with its letters unjoined on a printed agreement, the way a sign-painter would have laid them out in 1962, because the PDF library on the receipt server pre-dated the existence of a shaping engine in its language runtime. A search index had been returning empty for accounts the customer service team could see in the database because a 2017 import had encoded twelve thousand names using fossil Unicode codepoints from 1991 instead of regular ones from 1995, and the index, very reasonably, treated the two encodings as different strings, So, that ragged-left ticket was the smallest of the four, HOWEVER, it sat on top of the same iceberg and pointed at the same thing.

Blatantly Claude (which he recently started using, judging by https://lr0.org/diary/2026-02-26/ and https://lr0.org/diary/#08062026 - note how LLM-written the second one sounds, a little ironically).

And you can punch the essay into Pangram if you have any doubt (omit Arabic text and formatting if you do this, focus on just plain English to be safe). For example, go to the end* and try "Everything in this story that actually works was paid for by almost nobody...Somebody will close it, probably unpaid, possibly reading this (or writing it? who knows)." '100% AI.'

Or just compare it to his older writings. Does this 2023 piece https://lr0.org/blog/p/d/ or this 2024 piece https://lr0.org/blog/p/democracy/ sound like OP?

* I always check sections towards the end instead of the beginning, because a lot of authors will write the introduction by hand and then give up and let the AI write the rest; and also more advanced sloppers will fiddle with the opening until it beats Pangram, which is not hard since Pangram heavily favors false negatives on AI contribution, and skip the rest because they assume readers will be too lazy to check beyond that.

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

#86
post #85
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? This is one of the most clearly human written articles I could imagine. Can you explain what you mean?

No, it's not. (As should not be a surprise given how extensively LLMs are used to draft English-language articles these days.) It's actually incredibly blatant. Just look at this second paragraph: > The same six months I had closed three other tickets against the same product, each of which had presented to its filer as the only bug. A customer's name had appeared with its letters unjoined on a printed agreement, the…

I remain deeply unconvinced. I respect your writing and opinion enough to have actually put chunks of the essay into Pangram, including the part you label "blatantly Claude", and...they come out as 100% human. The 2023 and 2024 samples do, in fact, sound like OP, doubly so given that people change.

In 2020, I wrote a kitschy story where the characters talked with a cowboy affectation (https://spader.zone/the-fastest-gun/) which frankly borders on embarrassing for me now. I don't think my writing sounds much like it did then.

I think it's fucking embarrassing when people use LLMs to write prose for them. It's fundamentally different than software, for me. But I think your sensors are a bit miscalibrated. Regardless, thanks for all the good stuff over the years and thanks for the response.

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

#87
post #86
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. (As should not be a surprise given how extensively LLMs are used to draft English-language articles these days.) It's actually incredibly blatant. Just look at this second paragraph: > The same six months I had closed three other tickets against the same product, each of which had presented to its filer as the only bug. A customer's name had appeared with its letters unjoined on a printed agreement, the…

I remain deeply unconvinced. I respect your writing and opinion enough to have actually put chunks of the essay into Pangram, including the part you label "blatantly Claude", and...they come out as 100% human. The 2023 and 2024 samples do, in fact, sound like OP, doubly so given that people change. In 2020, I wrote a kitschy story where the characters talked with a cowboy affectation ( https://spader.zone/the-fastest…

> I remain deeply unconvinced...But I think your sensors are a bit miscalibrated.

That's unfortunate. Perhaps I should have mentioned before that the author of the post emailed me and said they had used LLMs extensively while writing it? Slipped my mind, I guess.

> including the part you label "blatantly Claude", and...they come out as 100% human

Pangram is designed to make many false negatives. I also checked the intro and got 100% human and shrugged; that's why I check towards the end, where if you tried the passage I specifically said comes up 100% AI, I assume that it would again. If Pangram can't hear it in that specific opening passage, oh well, doesn't make the rest go away.

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