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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)

#61

Post by Gander5739 »

helterskelter wrote: post #24
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…

> There is no way to change this, for example, in Android without basically rooting it and changing the system fonts. I am really surprised Android won't let the user select their own system font. This is a huge accessibility problem, especially for dyslexics.

You can do it on some vendors' versions, sometimes requiring third party apps like zfont.

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

#62

Post by IsTom »

RetroTechie wrote: post #55
ValdikSS wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

True type already has hinting virtual machine. It's not an entirely new thing.

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

#63

Post by mohsen1 »

linmer wrote: post #48
mohsen1 wrote: post #38

It's 2026 and things like kashida in CSS is not possible. Long way to go to support the Arabic script properly on the web. And as the article says, since most of the writing is happening on computers, stuff like kashida are going to be forgotten soon.

Hmm. by kashida do you mean something like 'ایـــــــــــــن'? I don't think you mean this, because I don't know how would you do it in CSS. Looks more like a problem to be solved with different types of character than styling. You may want to explain more.

there was some attempts to make this happen back in the days. see text-kashida-space. if drop letters are something CSS can own, why not kashida?

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

#64

Post by TFNA »

Panzerschrek wrote: post #46
theobreuerweil wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> an opinion I didn't read my comment properly. I have written, why Arabic alphabet is horrible. It's all cursive and letters aren't different enough from each other. > I’d add that neither the Arabic nor Latin alphabets were designed for anything. They both evolved organically from other previous alphabets. Many alphabets evolved from a need for daily stuff like accounting, where practicality matters. Arabs didn't h…

> Arabs didn't have widespread alphabet until they needed writing their sacred text

Many tens of thousands of pre-Islamic inscriptions made by Arabs are known. Arabs had been writing for centuries before the Quran, and the current Arabic script is just an iteration of earlier scripts. You might want to educate yourself.

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

#65

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

vessenes wrote: post #9
mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #3

Earlier 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 would push back about Arabic being glyph based, it's a phoneme rendered beautifully on paper. a modified latin script could faithfully reproduce it semantically except that readers won't be able to stop and smell the roses. Arguably, once someone is accustomed to reading a script, they don't think or care about the aesthetics much, and if they did, that's a bad property for information density anyways

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

#66

Post by abdullahkhalids »

ValdikSS wrote: post #41
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…

>compelling explanation for why Nastaliq is hard/unavailable https://www.tiro.com/John/TypeCon2014_Hudson_DECK.pdf

Nastaliq fonts already exist and used whenever possible. Yes, rendering a Nastaliq font takes marginally more compute. But in a world of electron apps which have a 10-100 times slower UX than they could be, saving compute is not an argument.

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

#67

Post by cyphar »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #17
cyphar wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Japanese also underwent simplification post-WW2, but there is important context here.

In both cases, the original plan was for Chinese characters to fall out of use entirely via gradual simplifications, but in both cases the simplifications stopped soon after the first planned stages and it seems very unlikely it would be a popular initiative at this stage. Basically what happened in both cases was the equivalent of a spelling reform, not the elimination of a writing system.

In the case of Japanese, it seems there is some regret around simplification because characters not in the 常用漢字表 do not have the component simplifications applied that the standardised characters do (for instance, 攪拌 is more commonly used than 撹拌 despite the 覚 component being the "modern" simplified form -- and there are characters with no simplified form like the first character in 艱難, first character in 辻褄, or 迄).

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

#68

Post by int_19h »

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.

Most writing systems are optimized for the way they end up being used in practice by the society of their time. Which has nothing to do with "writing sacred texts" per se, it's more a function of traditional means of writing things down and reading them. E.g. if you do lots of scrolls, top-down writing actually makes a lot of sense.
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