Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017) • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by ablob » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

Karliss wrote: post #10

harshreality wrote: post #7

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

The fact that the article was able to show correct version in regular text is pretty good indicator that if done correctly those are more or less solved problems. I don't disagree that there are probably plenty of times when those mistakes are repeated and solutions not used widely enough (more often for Arabic scripts than other languages), but even for 2017 it feels more like anecdotal examples of what can go wrong…

> Many users of CJK language would argue that CJK unification was a mistake.

Luckily it's not a decision without turning back. In most relevant contexts you should know the input language and can select a Font specifically using said variations. Of course this information will not be present in plain text, but if it turns out to become an issue I'd wager, since language codes do exist, that a control code-point for language selection can be added to the specification. There's already so many special cases in Unicode that it shouldn't be a huge issue (apart from backwards-incompatibility that would lead to tofu instead of no rendered glyph).

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

#52

Post by RetroTechie » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

smitty1e wrote: post #23

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #2

This 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…

This seems an esoteric problem for the outsider. But consider how cursive is dying out in (at least American) English, and how many centuries of writing will become unintelligible to the casual reader as a result. All of these important cultural artifacts require maintenance.

> All of these important cultural artifacts require maintenance.

This. Arabic users can complain about eg. Unicode not covering their writing in a suitable manner. And I (as a non-Arabic) can certainly see the problems described in the article.

But -going back to earlier days of computing- what stopped Arabic countries from devising a system that does that better than Unicode? (and covers other written languages like Hangul, Japanese or traditional Chinese, better than Unicode covers them)

Seems like that didn't happen? Either too few Arabic people cared, or solution(s) they came up with had shortcomings of their own & weren't implemented widely enough, or Unicode was good enough that few Arabic developers cared to go beyond that.

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

#53

Post by ablob » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

numpad0 wrote: post #25

yorwba wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't mix encodings in a single file. A file has one encoding only. It was not possible before Unicode to mix two languages in a single file, whether the languages involved were Chinese or Japanese or French(English was an exception). Now, if a file was encoded in Unicode, and/or if it was in such document format that support inline font specification, such as HTML, then you could mix two languages without having…

You may not be able to mix encodings, but mixing languages has always been possible. If you used a French encoding you would be able to write in English, but not the other way around. I'd wager there are similar cases for cyrillic text. What Unicode gave us is its universality (heh). You don't have to carefully select an encoding able to represent the languages you wish to use anymore.

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

#54

Post by abdullahkhalids » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 2:37 PM UTC

Conscat wrote: post #12

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #2

This 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…

There are many high quality Nastaliq fonts available. You can install them on your computer and use them easily in whatever software (example office apps) allows you to set the font.

There are no technical reasons preventing the use of Nastaliq fonts everywhere. Only product design decisions by big tech.

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

#55

Post by RetroTechie » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 2:37 PM UTC

ValdikSS wrote: post #40

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

Oh great. Embed executable into a format perceived to contain static data - as a core feature. That always worked so well!

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

#56

Post by ablob » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

Panzerschrek wrote: post #49

mxchelsemaan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 b…

> Arabic was the premier language for philosophy, science But this was not for ordinary people (peasants) or even accountants, where practicality matters. > Your brain is not powerful enough to pattern-match, but your incapacity is not universal With some training it's possible to read Arabic texts. But this requires more mental load and practice compared to other alphabetical systems. > Literal billions in the world…

I wonder by which metric you measure these scripts. Clearly it can't be on pronounciation or information density. If "amount of letters" is your pick, then Latin might be "objectively" the best system - you'd just be using a very bad metric.

If you're going to unify all the worlds language into one script, then you'd better pick a good measure for that. If everyone on the world learns it, then it doesn't matter if there are 50 or even 100 different characters.You will have to capture _all_ of the nuances of the languages without blowing them out of proportion in size. Good luck with that.

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

#57

Post by abdullahkhalids » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 2:59 PM UTC

RetroTechie wrote: post #52

smitty1e wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems an esoteric problem for the outsider. But consider how cursive is dying out in (at least American) English, and how many centuries of writing will become unintelligible to the casual reader as a result. All of these important cultural artifacts require maintenance.

> All of these important cultural artifacts require maintenance. This. Arabic users can complain about eg. Unicode not covering their writing in a suitable manner. And I (as a non-Arabic) can certainly see the problems described in the article. But -going back to earlier days of computing- what stopped Arabic countries from devising a system that does that better than Unicode? (and covers other written languages like…

It's likely the same problem as in Pakistan. Due to the history of colonialism/control by European powers, in these countries personal economic success is usually tied to command of English or French. So even within each of these countries, the rich, educated and those in power prefer latin script. Consequently, there was never any strong push to develop computing technology for local languages.

The other reason is that it's not technologically simple to solve all the issues highlighted in the TFA. Unicode actually does a pretty decent job of setting a uniform standard, but a lot of software has to be written on top of it to get the entire system working: (1) your software must support bidi text, (2) good fonts must be available to display the text in multiple languages (3) textual data needs to be properly stored in unicode and transmitted as is at every point in the OS (4) search engines must deal with the complications of non-breaking spaces and legacy unicode characters.

You have to kind of rewrite the entire stack from top to bottom. Preferential Arabic/Persian/Urdu speakers never had the technical skills and the political power to drive those changes in software largely written in different continents.

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

#58

Post by RetroTechie » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 3:13 PM UTC

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?

Why should all writing be forced into 1 way of doing things? That just sounds disrespectful of other peoples' culture.

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

#59

Post by mxchelsemaan » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 3:20 PM UTC

RetroTechie wrote: post #58

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?

Why should all writing be forced into 1 way of doing things? That just sounds disrespectful of other peoples' culture.

His username is a Nazi anti-tank weapon. I suspect "disrespectful of other peoples' culture" is an understatement for OP.

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

#60

Post by mxchelsemaan » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 3:30 PM UTC

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #3

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #2

This 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 don't know why people look down their noses at Arabizi

It's aesthetically revolting and allows for multiple renderings of the same word.