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The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

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

#31

Post by hackpelican »

slibhb wrote: post #30
somat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, English has a joined form(cursive) that is nearly dead because mechanical text assistance devices (first typewriters, now computers) work much better with the block form. While sad in a cultural loss sort of way the joined form only really makes sense when the text is hand written. I am not familiar with the history of Arabic typography, but I sort of assume there was an archaic block form and their curre…

Another wrinkle with Arabic is linguistic conservatism. Due to Islamism and the idea that Arabic is the language of of God (the Quran was written in Arabic by the supposedly illiterate prophet), Arabic has lagged behind other languages in terms of innovation. Hebrew is a closely related semitic language that simply adopted a block and cursive form. It has also been greatly simplified and friendlier towards loanwords,…

Muslims don’t believe Arabic is the language of God. They believe that the Quran was revealed in Arabic (true). Thinking the creator of the heavens and earth only speaks one language is absurd. It also kind of implies that Muslims believe in a superiority of Arabs which is also not true.

Weird to say Arabic hasn’t innovated or evolved considering the wild variety of dialects spoken in the modern world.

Conflating the language with the script is also bizarre. In terms of adapting Arabic to technology, look into romanized Arabic which was used before Unicode was common.

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

#32

Post by mook »

somat wrote: post #24
evmar wrote: post #15

One thing I sometimes think about when I think about text layout problems is how the text we use also has a bunch of complexities that we can take for granted. Think of variable width characters and kerning and ligatures and hyphenation and justification. Imagine computers had been won by a CJK language, which have none of these problems. You could imagine a similar article about how exotic and difficult English layo…

Conversely, English has a joined form(cursive) that is nearly dead because mechanical text assistance devices (first typewriters, now computers) work much better with the block form. While sad in a cultural loss sort of way the joined form only really makes sense when the text is hand written. I am not familiar with the history of Arabic typography, but I sort of assume there was an archaic block form and their curre…

There's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideographic_Description_Charac... that kind of does that. The problem is that there's character divergence (see all the brouhaha about Unicode Han unification), so there needs to be something else to select variants too.

As a reference, I don't believe any of the pre-Unicode CJK&c encodings attempted that.

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

#33

Post by evilturnip »

Arabic script is a great test to see if your terminal/renderer/UI can handle anything: contexual shaping, cursive connectivity, bidirectional text layout, diacritics and vertical displacement.

I went down this rabbit-hole awhile back and it made me really appreciate the complexity of the script.

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

#34

Post by kqr »

somat wrote: post #27
amluto wrote: post #10

Is this a small typo? > The relevant rule, W2 of UAX #9, reclassifies a digit as an ARABIC NUMBER if any of the previous strong characters in the paragraph were Arabic letters, and as a EUROPEAN NUMBER otherwise. Both render their internal digits left-to-right, which is correct: numbers everywhere on Earth are read most-significant-first. Does the author mean most-significant-on-the-left? The statement as written is…

This is a thing I have wondered about. are arabic numbers little endian when embeded in arabic text? The text is read right to left. But the numbers are the same as we put them in our left to right text where they are big-endian(read big to small). so are numbers in original arabic little-endian? read small to large. with the interesting side effect that numbers are universal.

I think least significant first is the most natural order for written numbers (and it makes addition easier.)

I had always assumed that was what was intended with Arabic numbers, only silly Europeans made a mistake when they borrowed the positional system and forgot Arabic is written the other way. (Or perhaps intentionally avoided mirroring the digits for ease of communication?)

But the author of this article makes it sound like even in Arabic, numbers are read out loud most significant first.

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

#36

Post by khaled »

somat wrote: post #24
evmar wrote: post #15

One thing I sometimes think about when I think about text layout problems is how the text we use also has a bunch of complexities that we can take for granted. Think of variable width characters and kerning and ligatures and hyphenation and justification. Imagine computers had been won by a CJK language, which have none of these problems. You could imagine a similar article about how exotic and difficult English layo…

Conversely, English has a joined form(cursive) that is nearly dead because mechanical text assistance devices (first typewriters, now computers) work much better with the block form. While sad in a cultural loss sort of way the joined form only really makes sense when the text is hand written. I am not familiar with the history of Arabic typography, but I sort of assume there was an archaic block form and their curre…

There is no unjoined form of Arabic. The Arabic script became Arabic when Nabataean script started developing joined letter forms. Unjoined Nabatean is as foreign to Arabic as Phoenician is to Greek.

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

#37

Post by khaled »

slim wrote: post #13
slim wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's talking about the rendering algorithm with regards to the stream of text. essentially saying rendering direction should follow reading convention. on the other hand, in formal arabic, it's not unusual that numers are read in clusters from least significant to most significant (right to left). 1984 would be read : eighty four and nine hundred and a thousand. not sure if the author is aware of this

actually : four and eighty and nine hundred and a thousand

Numbers below 100 are always read from right to left even in vernacular/informal/dialectical Arabic.

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

#38

Post by samat »

I feel so sorry for Arabs now, just read that paragraph about everyday experience of trying to write English-Arabic text in the mail or any other editor.

> I have watched senior engineers, fluent in both Arabic and English, give up on writing a long email in Outlook on a Wednesday afternoon because the cursor would not behave, and switch to Arabic-only or English-only because the cognitive cost of fighting the editor exceeded the cost of monolingual phrasing. Actually I remember very well suffering this while using Facebook for the first time in my life, and I could not register; I was very slow typer that when I reached the moment the cursor does this weird thing, I would just stare at it and never progress.

> This is the ordinary experience of writing mixed Arabic-English text in 2026, in every major editor, email client, and chat application I know of. The pettier cousins are everywhere too, and I collect them: a range like 10–20 silently reading as twenty-to-ten, because digits are weak and the dash is neutral; a trailing exclamation mark teleporting to the far end of the line; a password, toggled visible, displaying in an order that does not match what was typed. None of these are anyone's bug, exactly.

My own Cyrillic struggles are nothing in comparison.

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

#39

Post by jazzyb »

kqr wrote: post #35

This explains a lot of why I think Arabic looks so beautiful on the page. I also love the way it can sound when spoken. Shame I don't have reason good enough to take the years I would need to learn it.

Learning language is like learning poetry. Your appreciation of the thing grows proportionally with the practice. Which means you don't need to learn to fluency to appreciate Arabic. Even modest practice, just learning to write the alphabet, will increase your appreciation for the language if that's what you'd like to do.

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

#40

Post by khoirul »

samat wrote: post #38

I feel so sorry for Arabs now, just read that paragraph about everyday experience of trying to write English-Arabic text in the mail or any other editor. > I have watched senior engineers, fluent in both Arabic and English, give up on writing a long email in Outlook on a Wednesday afternoon because the cursor would not behave, and switch to Arabic-only or English-only because the cognitive cost of fighting the editor…

Monday's editor does this even for English text!
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