The Challenges of Typesetting Arabic Script
pTamok writes:
Typesetting, or the craft of mechanically or algorithmically placing characters on a page so they are pleasing to the beholder, is an interesting craft. It is related to calligraphy, which is the art or craft of manually (handwriting) placing characters on a page so they are pleasing to the beholder.
Typesetting Arabic script has its own peculiar challenges: the script is written from right to left; it is only cursive; some letter-forms vary according to whether they start a word, are in its body, or terminate the word; and justification is achieved by varying the width of portions of the letters in words, not by varying the spaces between words.
Modern operating systems, are in general, very bad at rendering Arabic script well.
This blog goes into a deep dive of the history of Arabic typesetting, and modern challenges.
Quoting with some slight rewording and editing:
The rules for laying out classical Arabic script were written down by Ibn Muqla, Abbasid vizier and chief calligrapher, who served three caliphs in succession and was imprisoned by two of them; the third had his right hand amputated on a charge of treasonous correspondence, and Ibn Muqla then kept writing for the next several months by lashing a reed pen to the stump of his wrist, and was rewarded for what he wrote by having his tongue cut out, and died in prison around the year 940.
The system he wrote down outlasted everybody who hurt him by a thousand years. It is called al-kha al-mansb, the proportional script; every letterform measured in rhombic dots of the reed nib, every curve a defined arc of a defined circle, the alif a fixed number of dots high and anything else derived from the alif. Within that system the elongation is a drawn stroke with its own rules, which letter pairs accept it, how the curve swells and tapers, how many elongations a line may carry, where they may sit. The scribes also justified by choosing different shapes, because most letters have alternate forms of different widths, and a skilled hand selects among them as the margin approaches. In this tradition, you justify by reshaping the letters, not by spacing the words.
The tradition Ibn Muqla started did not stay with him; it was refined, in writing, by named human beings over the following six hundred years. Ibn al-Bawwb in Baghdad, around the year 1022, smoothed out the proportions and produced the manuscript that defined Naskh for the rest of the millennium; a single Qurn in his hand survives in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, and you can date the Persian, Ottoman, and Mamluk traditions by how closely they follow it.
Print and the Arabic script met badly, and that meeting set the pattern for almost everything since: when the machine cannot do the script, simplify the script, ship it, and call it progress.
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