This is very nice; and easy to read... one of my main qualms with Arabic fonts has been their jaggedness. The evenness of this font will not only make code and comments look beautiful; but also the web!
Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font
11–20 of 44 posts
Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font
#12The font's designer here- glad you guys like it! I wasn't ready to put this up on HN because I didn't have an English page yet, but @specifictso has gone ahead and posted it. The font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License as mentioned. There's less than 10 Arabic monospaced typefaces out there and Kawkab Mono comes to fill a gap in this area. Might not be as highly demanded as Latin monospaced fonts, but still,…
Awesome work, يعطيك العافية!
Is there a link to the font on github?
Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font
#13Out of curiosity, what text editors work well with Arabic these days? A few years back, when Textmate was still very popular, I had to sometimes do i18n work. I had a coworker for a different department who was a native Arabic speaker, who would help me out, but together we still struggled. We'd put the cursor where an edit needed to be made, and changes would appear elsewhere. It took lots of trial-and-error to get…
It's very hit and miss in terms of code editors. For example Sublime Text has no complex text shaping at all. It actually renders Arabic as disjointed letters.
The JetBrains series of IDEs have some Arabic support, in the sense that the text is rendered properly at least.
I made an Arabic Markdown editor for the Mac last year, so that personally helps me when I need to edit Arabic text http://katibapp.com/
There's a lot left to be done for Arabic. So much low-hanging fruit.
Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font
#14The font's designer here- glad you guys like it! I wasn't ready to put this up on HN because I didn't have an English page yet, but @specifictso has gone ahead and posted it. The font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License as mentioned. There's less than 10 Arabic monospaced typefaces out there and Kawkab Mono comes to fill a gap in this area. Might not be as highly demanded as Latin monospaced fonts, but still,…
Awesome work, يعطيك العافية! Is there a link to the font on github?
Will put up the source code on Github very soon. I just need to organize everything a bit.
Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font
#15The font's designer here- glad you guys like it! I wasn't ready to put this up on HN because I didn't have an English page yet, but @specifictso has gone ahead and posted it. The font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License as mentioned. There's less than 10 Arabic monospaced typefaces out there and Kawkab Mono comes to fill a gap in this area. Might not be as highly demanded as Latin monospaced fonts, but still,…
I can't read it, but I've noticed the red marks move relative to the glyph when playing with the resize slider: https://youtu.be/CiOg12B6A4g
Google Chrome 46.0.2490.71 on Linux
Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font
#16Are there more basic string operations that need to be available for Arabic, a quick play with copy and paste produces all sorts of unusual effects I assume because of combining marks not being copied or being suitable in their new contexts. I'd assume that the text is modified in units more complex than substrings and whitespace splitting?
> I'd assume that the text is modified in units more complex than substrings and whitespace splitting?
Correct. Each letter in Arabic can have up to four shapes depending on its position in a word: initial, medial, final and isolated[0].
Also note that the sample text on the left contains Arabic diacritics[1]. These are usually omitted by native speakers/writers since they can be inferred from the context (the only exception I can think of is religious scripture), but they certainly add to the complexity of it all.
Needless to say, creating an Arabic mono-font is quite challenging. Kudos to the designer.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet#Letter_forms
Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font
#17Out of curiosity, what text editors work well with Arabic these days? A few years back, when Textmate was still very popular, I had to sometimes do i18n work. I had a coworker for a different department who was a native Arabic speaker, who would help me out, but together we still struggled. We'd put the cursor where an edit needed to be made, and changes would appear elsewhere. It took lots of trial-and-error to get…
It's very hit and miss in terms of code editors. For example Sublime Text has no complex text shaping at all. It actually renders Arabic as disjointed letters. The JetBrains series of IDEs have some Arabic support, in the sense that the text is rendered properly at least. I made an Arabic Markdown editor for the Mac last year, so that personally helps me when I need to edit Arabic text http://katibapp.com/ There's a…
Emacs claims support for Arabic editing. How is this in practice?
Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font
#18This would be great for قلب! It's an Arabic programming language: http://nas.sr/%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A8/
(repl here: http://qlb-repl.herokuapp.com/)
If you don't speak Arabic (like me, for now :<), you might have to look at the source code to figure out how to use it. :)
Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very hit and miss in terms of code editors. For example Sublime Text has no complex text shaping at all. It actually renders Arabic as disjointed letters. The JetBrains series of IDEs have some Arabic support, in the sense that the text is rendered properly at least. I made an Arabic Markdown editor for the Mac last year, so that personally helps me when I need to edit Arabic text http://katibapp.com/ There's a…
Emacs claims support for Arabic editing. How is this in practice?
It's perfect.
Re: Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font
#20Wow, this really shows off how pretty Arabic looks. I can't read a word of it but I really appreciate the aesthetics of the language and it's unfortunate it always gets mucked up in digital format.