11–20 of 35 posts
It’s interesting to see an article to decipher the sentence when I know Arabic handwriting calligraphy in different fonts! The “bisme” itself btw is also a combination of two different words. And “kashida” is a persian word not Arabic, the Arabic one is probably “maddah”.
I thought it was "tatwil". I could be wrong, though. An interesting article on Arabic typography, whose correctness I can't judge:
﷽ It's pretty great fun pasting it into various text entry fields to see how they behave. In standard-ish single-line-ish Apple text fields on my Mac (iMessage text entry field, Chrome Omnibox), it renders like this, which... I'm not sure is correct? https://cleanshot.com/share/0GkNJGQ7 On the other hand it renders akin to Chrome in TextEdit.
Arabic is a beautiful language. Seeing Arabic calligraphy has made me add Arabic to the list of languages I am very slowly teaching myself.
Islam prohibits representational art and so, except for a few pockets, all the skills of Muslim artists went into two things - Calligraphy and geometric tessellations (what's called "arabesque" and which you see on mosques, rugs etc.). The calligraphy itself has several hands (which is what we call "fonts"). The most popular one is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naskh_(script) which is the one used for the copies of the Koran from Saudi Arabia. It's very legible and doesn't lend itself to too much flourishing. The Basmala glyph mentioned in the article looks like Naskh with the S of Basmala (س) elongated. There are others too. Thuluth (which is used in the copies of the Koran for ornamental work like the titles of the chapters), Nastaliq (which people often call Urdu or Persian because of how those languages are usually written in this hand), Kufic (which is an angular hand that overlaps with tessellations in ornamental work), Mughlai (which is a denser hand that's common in the Indian Subcontinent) and several others. There are even local variants with which you can identify geography. This style is specific to the Malabar coast in Kerala and, as far as I know, it's seen only there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabi_Malayalam_script#/media/...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That iMessage rendering looks correct, just typeset differently.
Thank you for sharing! I wonder what distinguishes e.g. Omnibox/iMessage from TextEdit/Chrome textareas (especially since iMessage's entry box can be made multiline) to cause the divergent rendering!
Arabic is a beautiful language. Seeing Arabic calligraphy has made me add Arabic to the list of languages I am very slowly teaching myself.
Yup. I practice western calligraphy but haven't been able to make much inroads into Arabic. Partly because of the lack of high quality instruction material (which is available as books for Western calligraphy) and partly because of the complexity. The fact that it's right to left and I'm right handed presents some challenges too (my hand will come over letters I've just written and there's a risk of smudging them). T…
You’re supposed to place your hand under the line you’re writing. Not to the right of it.
﷽ It's pretty great fun pasting it into various text entry fields to see how they behave. In standard-ish single-line-ish Apple text fields on my Mac (iMessage text entry field, Chrome Omnibox), it renders like this, which... I'm not sure is correct? https://cleanshot.com/share/0GkNJGQ7 On the other hand it renders akin to Chrome in TextEdit.
What's curious to me is that Apple only uses Noto Nastaliq Urdu if Urdu is enabled in preferred languages and is higher than any other Arabic-script language. [2] Is that so on your machine?
[1] https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Nastaliq+Urdu?pr... (There's a slight difference in the placement of diacritics here because of a newer font version.)
[2] https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/latin-fonts-correct...
We have a framed calligraphy at home, and it was fascinating to teach my wife how it is read. The one in the article (wikimedia picture) is actually read from the bottom up, yet it is somehow legible.
﷽ It's pretty great fun pasting it into various text entry fields to see how they behave. In standard-ish single-line-ish Apple text fields on my Mac (iMessage text entry field, Chrome Omnibox), it renders like this, which... I'm not sure is correct? https://cleanshot.com/share/0GkNJGQ7 On the other hand it renders akin to Chrome in TextEdit.
So using the Abjad system to give number values to the Arab letters there are many counts that add up to a multiple of 19. A critic (and I try to be one) so note that every 19 tries ("would this add up to a multiple of 19?") you are expected to find one that does add up to a multiple of 19!
In order to show how many cases add up, I created a unit test suite to demonstrate the claims.
See the code here:
https://github.com/cies/quran-analysis/blob/master/replicate...
Many of the claims involve the Bismallah (search for "bismallah" in that code).
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