The Beauty Of Typography: Writing Systems And Calligraphy Of The World | Hacker News Reader

The Beauty Of Typography: Writing Systems And Calligraphy Of The World

smashingmagazine.com

113 pointsdanh15 comments

http://www.omniglot.com

brings me hours of enjoyment.

Great, now I won't sleep tonight as I learn the difference between syllabic alphabets and syllabaries. I hate you in the kindest way possible. ;]

It's pretty much one of the best little corners of the Internet ever.

You're welcome. :D

If you're interested in human languages, another great place on the internet is:

http://www.ethnologue.com/

I've spent countless hours on both Omniglot and Ethnologue.

Just had to get in on the hate, eh, teejae? Ah, well, I can sleep when I'm dead.

Holy cow, has Smashing always published these sorts of articles, or is this an outlier? Quite the departure from their often-linked "40 Wordpress Themes!" posts.

I guess there's a mix but I like their compilations. IMO regular viewing of large galleries of designs can only lead to improvement (even if it's "what not to do"), and they've done the assembly work for me.

This article seems to be mostly a compilation itself. If it was titled "8 Forms of Asian Calligraphy", it would fit into the pattern you describe.

Of course, Smashing always picks the best free lancers to write for them. Even then, once you get past their list articles, the provide very insightful piece of writing. Most their best stuff is in their design category. Here's a three part series on color: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/08/color-theory-for-...

This was a fascinating and very informative read. I spent many a nights toiling over the intricacies of the Devanagari script when I was coding http://chime.tv/products/hind2000/ss.shtml as a kid. My biggest take-away was that combining different characters is pretty much required though difficult to implement. If you spell "MItI" and then edited it to "MIttI", I would have to replace the 't' with a special double 'tt' character. Simply adding another 't' character would not suffice.

The new convention for happy co-existence with the pared-down font engines packaged in devices like the iPhone is to use two 't' characters after all, but add a slanting accent underneath the first 't' (or whatever letter it is) to indicate that it should only be 'pronounced half'.

It's like Nastaliq's (the Urdu script) jazm character: http://users.skynet.be/hugocoolens/newurdu/specials.html

I think it's a sane move.

> The new convention

I don't think the convention of the slanting accent ("virama" or "halant") is new. I know it's been used in books for at least the last hundred years. This means that conjoined ligatures aren't strictly necessary, but they're used a lot in handwriting and IMO look quite beautiful.

Their best article so far IMHO. Let's get more of this. Articles where you actually learn something.

don't miss the animation in the middle showing how "Al Jazeera" in Naskh (printed Arabic form) gets transformed into their logo.

Amazing! Thank you.

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