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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)

#31

Post by Panzerschrek »

cenamus wrote: post #27
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).

Having latin alphabet with diacritics and digraphs is still better than something like Arabic. Some non-latin alphabet with letters separate from each other (like Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian, etc.) would be fine too.

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

#32

Post by mxchelsemaan »

Panzerschrek wrote: post #30
ah27182 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>As I understand, Arabic alphabet wasn't designed to be practical for daily use and only for writing sacred texts.

You clearly don't. Arabic was the premier language for philosophy, science, and mathematics in the middle ages. Algebra, algorithms, zero, cipher, average, and so on are all etymologically Arabic. One might start to suspect bigotry from a "Panzerschrek."

>Letters have similar form to each other, joints between them makes it harder to take them apart.

Your brain is not powerful enough to pattern-match, but your incapacity is not universal.

>It's objectively so horrible.

Literal billions in the world disagree. I might equally claim that the Arabic abjad is infinitely more beautiful than the pedestrian Latin alphabet, especially when expressed in the ugly and diseased Orc-tongue that is called German. [1] Your lack of taste is not universal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS_-7B1FAbE&pp=ygUaY2hpbmVzZ...

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

#33

Post by linmer »

Not only writing and printing is hard, so is selection and moving your cursor. Because in most tools, the right and left arrow keys don't mean right and left in Arabic, Persian etc. It's reversed in RTL languages, so right arrow moves the cursor to end direction (left in LTR, right in RTL) and left arrow moves you towards start direction (right in LTR, left in RTL). So in bidirectional text, for example when majority of the text is English and you have a short RTL phrase, you are holding right arrow and then then when you reach the RTL part the cursor suddenly jumps to the start of RTL text, then it goes to left and it SEEMS like you are going backward to the start, not forward. That is until you reach the end of RTL phrase and you teleport to start of next LTR part.

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

#34

Post by linmer »

Panzerschrek wrote: post #30
ah27182 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you think Arabic horrible because it has connected letters, so is cursive. But I like both cursive and Arabic. You can easily distinguish separate words as the words' letters are connected, and you don't have to put less space to show that some letters are making a word. It's not optimized for printing and digital fonts I agree. But you can't say it's not useful for daily use. It's so much easier on paper.

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

#36

Post by theobreuerweil »

Panzerschrek wrote: post #30
ah27182 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How can you describe something as “objectively” horrible-looking? Your opinion on the way that something looks is precisely that: an opinion. I’d add that neither the Arabic nor Latin alphabets were designed for anything. They both evolved organically from other previous alphabets.

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

#37

Post by linmer »

bradrn wrote: post #29
Conscat wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ma…

Yeah, but the difficulty isn't in rendering the fonts, it's for the font creator. So once the font is ready with all the combinations it rendering and using a Nastaliq font doesn't differ with rendering a Naskh. Nastaliq fonts are available in Persian, not sure if true for other languages, but it's just more complexity on making the font. For using a ready font the only thing needed is permission to change the font.

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

#39

Post by yorwba »

bradrn wrote: post #29
Conscat wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ma…

SIL's Nastaliq font uses their own Graphite engine, which is included in Firefox but not other browsers (Demo page: https://graphite.sil.org/graphite_fontdemo ), but e.g. Noto Nastaliq Urdu also exists https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Nastaliq+Urdu?pr... and does a decent job in non-Graphite engines, certainly better than Awami Nastaliq without Graphite.

So the real question is why Android doesn't make it easy to put Noto Nastaliq Urdu in the font stack.

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

#40

Post by ValdikSS »

harshreality wrote: post #7

(2017) How much of this is still a problem with modern software/font stacks and harfbuzz?

It still is a problem in general, that's why fonts now have webassembly in it.

This repository has a good outlook: https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz-wasm-examples

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