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Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)

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Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)

#21

Post by mchaver »

Conscat wrote: post #12
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #2

This problem is not limited to Arabic. Variants of the arabic alphabet are used by Persian (including Iranian and Dari dialects), Mazanderani, Qashqai, Luri, Gilaki, Kurdish (excluding Kurds in Turkey), Talysh, Azerbaijani (in Iran), Pamir languages, Pashto, Urdu, Balochi, Sindhi (in Pakistan), Punjabi (in Pakistan), Uzbek (in Afghanistan), Turkmen (in Afghanistan), Saraiki, Hindko, Brahui, languages spoken in Kashmi…

I feel like I've never gotten a compelling explanation for why Nastaliq is hard/unavailable. I'm not an expert on abjads, but it doesn't look harder to render then Naskh (and it self-evidently is possible since the fonts exist). Does anyone here know why they make it difficult? Urdu is much less obscure than, say, Sharada or other languages with Unicode support. I think Punjabi is also often written in Nastaliq when…

My guess would be line height is a challenge and Naskh already exists. Then probably because these scripts are not used often in the places that are centers of software/OS development.

Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)

#22

Post by mchaver »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #3
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #2

This problem is not limited to Arabic. Variants of the arabic alphabet are used by Persian (including Iranian and Dari dialects), Mazanderani, Qashqai, Luri, Gilaki, Kurdish (excluding Kurds in Turkey), Talysh, Azerbaijani (in Iran), Pamir languages, Pashto, Urdu, Balochi, Sindhi (in Pakistan), Punjabi (in Pakistan), Uzbek (in Afghanistan), Turkmen (in Afghanistan), Saraiki, Hindko, Brahui, languages spoken in Kashmi…

I don't know why people look down their noses at Arabizi

Probably because it's a work around and not what most people want to do. Imagine someone telling you you have to type English in Cyrillic. I know if I could no longer type out Chinese characters and had to use pinyin it would feel very odd and like something was taken away.

Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)

#23

Post by smitty1e »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #2

This problem is not limited to Arabic. Variants of the arabic alphabet are used by Persian (including Iranian and Dari dialects), Mazanderani, Qashqai, Luri, Gilaki, Kurdish (excluding Kurds in Turkey), Talysh, Azerbaijani (in Iran), Pamir languages, Pashto, Urdu, Balochi, Sindhi (in Pakistan), Punjabi (in Pakistan), Uzbek (in Afghanistan), Turkmen (in Afghanistan), Saraiki, Hindko, Brahui, languages spoken in Kashmi…

This seems an esoteric problem for the outsider.

But consider how cursive is dying out in (at least American) English, and how many centuries of writing will become unintelligible to the casual reader as a result.

All of these important cultural artifacts require maintenance.

Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)

#24

Post by helterskelter »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #2

This problem is not limited to Arabic. Variants of the arabic alphabet are used by Persian (including Iranian and Dari dialects), Mazanderani, Qashqai, Luri, Gilaki, Kurdish (excluding Kurds in Turkey), Talysh, Azerbaijani (in Iran), Pamir languages, Pashto, Urdu, Balochi, Sindhi (in Pakistan), Punjabi (in Pakistan), Uzbek (in Afghanistan), Turkmen (in Afghanistan), Saraiki, Hindko, Brahui, languages spoken in Kashmi…

> There is no way to change this, for example, in Android without basically rooting it and changing the system fonts.

I am really surprised Android won't let the user select their own system font. This is a huge accessibility problem, especially for dyslexics.

Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)

#25

Post by numpad0 »

yorwba wrote: post #18
numpad0 wrote: post #11

It's... interesting how the author sees Han Unification as a feature, when it's just a longstanding and politically charged bug. CJK languages are mutually unintelligible, so displaying CJK texts in wrong fonts won't do anything meaningful; it won't make texts in one language readable to speakers of other languages.

Indeed displaying CJK texts in wrong fonts won't do anything to change the meaning and people who can read it in one font can read it in any font. They might complain that it looks ugly because that one stroke should be slightly longer and have a different angle, but those are ultimately aesthetic preferences that don't affect readability. Even before Unicode, it was established practice that documents mixing Chinese…

You can't mix encodings in a single file. A file has one encoding only. It was not possible before Unicode to mix two languages in a single file, whether the languages involved were Chinese or Japanese or French(English was an exception).

Now, if a file was encoded in Unicode, and/or if it was in such document format that support inline font specification, such as HTML, then you could mix two languages without having to stick to one language by e.g. wrapping paragraphs and words with tags.

My point is, it seems that the author is not aware that each of CJK languages are only understood within each countries, in both writings and speeches, and that's somewhat peculiar.

Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)

#26

Post by cenamus »

smitty1e wrote: post #23
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #2

This problem is not limited to Arabic. Variants of the arabic alphabet are used by Persian (including Iranian and Dari dialects), Mazanderani, Qashqai, Luri, Gilaki, Kurdish (excluding Kurds in Turkey), Talysh, Azerbaijani (in Iran), Pamir languages, Pashto, Urdu, Balochi, Sindhi (in Pakistan), Punjabi (in Pakistan), Uzbek (in Afghanistan), Turkmen (in Afghanistan), Saraiki, Hindko, Brahui, languages spoken in Kashmi…

This seems an esoteric problem for the outsider. But consider how cursive is dying out in (at least American) English, and how many centuries of writing will become unintelligible to the casual reader as a result. All of these important cultural artifacts require maintenance.

This has pretty much already happened for the older style of German cursive, called Kurrent. Partly also because the Nazis got rid of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurrent

Tons of old documents written in it, basically impossible to decipher for anyone that only learned to write "modern" cursive or even print.

Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)

#27

Post by cenamus »

Panzerschrek wrote: post #15

Why do people still use this horrible-looking and hard to process alphabet? Why not switching to latin (as some countries did) or at least to reform it so that it's easier to type and to read?

Because pretty much no language besides Latin actually maps nicely to the Latin script. Pretty much all languages use digraphs, diacritic symbols or completely new letters in the Latin script (even English, œ and æ, for some time at least).

Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)

#29

Post by bradrn »

Conscat wrote: post #12
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #2

This problem is not limited to Arabic. Variants of the arabic alphabet are used by Persian (including Iranian and Dari dialects), Mazanderani, Qashqai, Luri, Gilaki, Kurdish (excluding Kurds in Turkey), Talysh, Azerbaijani (in Iran), Pamir languages, Pashto, Urdu, Balochi, Sindhi (in Pakistan), Punjabi (in Pakistan), Uzbek (in Afghanistan), Turkmen (in Afghanistan), Saraiki, Hindko, Brahui, languages spoken in Kashmi…

I feel like I've never gotten a compelling explanation for why Nastaliq is hard/unavailable. I'm not an expert on abjads, but it doesn't look harder to render then Naskh (and it self-evidently is possible since the fonts exist). Does anyone here know why they make it difficult? Urdu is much less obscure than, say, Sharada or other languages with Unicode support. I think Punjabi is also often written in Nastaliq when…

In Naskh, each letter has only four forms (for the most part — there are a few ligatures etc. but I think ‘only four forms’ remains basically true). The choice between forms is determined almost entirely by position within a word (initial/medial/final/isolated). All the letters are aligned along the baseline and connect to each other in basically the same way.

By contrast Nastaliq is a much more complicated style. Many letters and letter combinations take on several different forms depending on which other letters surround them. Letter joins are usually diagonal, so letters earlier in a word need to be shifted above the baseline by a variable amount. Having to shift letters vertically as well as horizontally greatly complicates other aspects of the style too.

(I recall seeing a nice table some time ago showing all the various different possibilities for letter joins in Nastaliq. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find it again. Still, you might get some idea by consulting the documentation of one of the existing Nastaliq fonts, e.g. Awami Nastaliq: https://software.sil.org/awami/what-is-special/)

Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)

#30

Post by Panzerschrek »

ah27182 wrote: post #19
Panzerschrek wrote: post #15

Why do people still use this horrible-looking and hard to process alphabet? Why not switching to latin (as some countries did) or at least to reform it so that it's easier to type and to read?

What’s the point of insulting a script as “horrible looking”. What a silly comment, please grow up.

It's objectively so horrible. Letters have similar form to each other, joints between them makes it harder to take them apart. As I understand, Arabic alphabet wasn't designed to be practical for daily use and only for writing sacred texts.
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