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.
Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)
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Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)
#12This 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 it's not in Gurmukhi or Roman.
Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a while, Arabizi was wildly popular and universally used on feature phones. When mobiles became smarter, it was used less. Japanese has romaji and Mandarin has pinyin. Arabic's Arabizi would increase literacy rates and solve all these digital problems.
The vast majority of Japanese and Mandarin speakers are also not in favour of replacing their current writing systems (which give them a link to thousands of years of their own history) in favour of simplified systems. I suspect it is the same for Arabic speakers.
Romaji/pinyin are widely used for typing the actual written scripts. They're not seen as alternate written scripts outside of edge case scenarios(like chats in FPS)
Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why people look down their noses at Arabizi
For a while, Arabizi was wildly popular and universally used on feature phones. When mobiles became smarter, it was used less. Japanese has romaji and Mandarin has pinyin. Arabic's Arabizi would increase literacy rates and solve all these digital problems.
Romanization is a separate issue to using fixed glyphs.
There was a theory in the XIX / early XX century that full literacy was impossible without the Latin script but such claims are ridiculous especially for Arabic which is an alphabetic script already. China has higher literacy rates than Vietnam, for example.
I don't think the many composition rules of Unicode are really necessary, though. Maybe as an extension for academic work or artistic compositions but not for computing.
If all we had were movable types, all of these language users would find a way to write their language that wouldn't require a Turing-complete computer on each glyph. Now the Unicode gods pander to some of these computer-hostile scripts making the users of different scripts feel slighted.
Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)
#15Why 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?
Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why people look down their noses at Arabizi
I don’t know either, but I am aware that in glyph based languages (and this article makes the case that Arabic has some glyph-like features), there is considerable social discussion about the equivalents, like pinyin. Detractors worry that sound-based (where sounds are based on the latin / western orthography) approaches to writing change something fundamental in people’s brains as distinct from more native versions.…
> I’m sure there’s a technical Unicode word for this process of matching codepoints for e.g. search and uniqueness of rendering
That’d be Unicode Normalization. I don’t have an opinion on the best source for more details, so here’s a link from unicode.org https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/
I don’t know enough to know whether or not there are still Arabic-specific issues, either in the spec or the implementations.
The example in the article of copy/paste/search is interesting. I think it’s equally likely to be a RtL issue as a normalization bug, but I haven’t done anything significant with either topic.
Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a while, Arabizi was wildly popular and universally used on feature phones. When mobiles became smarter, it was used less. Japanese has romaji and Mandarin has pinyin. Arabic's Arabizi would increase literacy rates and solve all these digital problems.
The vast majority of Japanese and Mandarin speakers are also not in favour of replacing their current writing systems (which give them a link to thousands of years of their own history) in favour of simplified systems. I suspect it is the same for Arabic speakers.
I generally agree with what you're saying, but there is rather famously a simplified form of chinese that was designed specifically to increase literacy rates.
Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)
#18It'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 and Japanese would use the same encoding for both and roughly nobody would bother to pick an ugly font for the foreign-language text to make it look appropriately different.
Unicode rightly decided that the fine details of appearance are left to fonts. Otherwise you'd also need e.g. a bunch of extra codepoints so that early-20th-century handwritten letters in German can have their look accurately preserved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin
Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)
#19Why 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.
Re: Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)
#20For a while, Arabizi was wildly popular and universally used on feature phones. When mobiles became smarter, it was used less. Japanese has romaji and Mandarin has pinyin. Arabic's Arabizi would increase literacy rates and solve all these digital problems.
Many Arabic-speaking countries already have very high literacy rates. Meanwhile Somali is a related language officially written in the Latin alphabet, but Somalia has a literacy rate around 50%: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-ra...
So adopting Arabizi without increasing access to education can be expected to do roughly nothing for literacy, whereas with a good education system, people can learn to read and write in Arabic script just fine.