Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)
digitalorientalist.com
digitalorientalist.com
Whole languages are dying out because people are unable to express them properly on computers. Even popular software that dominate these speakers does not care to improve their experience. For example, Urdu has traditionally been written in the Nastaliq form [1], but is usually is rendered everywhere in the Naskh form [2]. There is no way to change this, for example, in Android without basically rooting it and changing the system fonts.
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).
There was a theory in the XIX / early XX century that full literacy was impossible without the Latin script but such claims are ridiculous especially for Arabic which is an alphabetic script already. China has higher literacy rates than Vietnam, for example.
I don't think the many composition rules of Unicode are really necessary, though. Maybe as an extension for academic work or artistic compositions but not for computing.
If all we had were movable types, all of these language users would find a way to write their language that wouldn't require a Turing-complete computer on each glyph. Now the Unicode gods pander to some of these computer-hostile scripts making the users of different scripts feel slighted.
In Chinese for instance, you can use a keyboard that combines radicals - parts of a character, or you can use a keyboard that combines phonemes. Those seem likely to change literally how you think in your language. There may be related concerns for Arabic.
That said, one of the complaints in the blog is that two different codepoints render to the same exact letter / phrase / word — this is not a problem unique to Arabic in Unicode, and there are known approaches: I’d expect (I’m not a Unicode expert by any means) that more work on the tech stack for rectification (I’m sure there’s a technical Unicode word for this process of matching codepoints for e.g. search and uniqueness of rendering) would likely be useful for Arabic, and relatively seamlessly flow in many places.
That’d be Unicode Normalization. I don’t have an opinion on the best source for more details, so here’s a link from unicode.org https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/
I don’t know enough to know whether or not there are still Arabic-specific issues, either in the spec or the implementations.
The example in the article of copy/paste/search is interesting. I think it’s equally likely to be a RtL issue as a normalization bug, but I haven’t done anything significant with either topic.
By contrast Nastaliq is a much more complicated style. Many letters and letter combinations take on several different forms depending on which other letters surround them. Letter joins are usually diagonal, so letters earlier in a word need to be shifted above the baseline by a variable amount. Having to shift letters vertically as well as horizontally greatly complicates other aspects of the style too.
(I recall seeing a nice table some time ago showing all the various different possibilities for letter joins in Nastaliq. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find it again. Still, you might get some idea by consulting the documentation of one of the existing Nastaliq fonts, e.g. Awami Nastaliq: https://software.sil.org/awami/what-is-special/)
(Though that said, a sibling post linked this interesting talk on limitations in OpenType itself: https://www.tiro.com/John/TypeCon2014_Hudson_DECK.pdf)
So the real question is why Android doesn't make it easy to put Noto Nastaliq Urdu in the font stack.
I personally spent way to much time trying to understand it, but at least according to this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaA0v0V4RsU) it really is not that difficult if you leave out all the font-selection and emoji shenanigans.
I think at least FreeType (glyph rendering) and HarfBuzz (text shaping) make it needlessly complex through their documentation. It is extensive in describing what the parts do, but the only way to figure out what you need is by fiddling around. As soon as you want to do more complex stuff you're on your own. Especially figuring out which parts you don't need is annoying.
There are no technical reasons preventing the use of Nastaliq fonts everywhere. Only product design decisions by big tech.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurrent
Tons of old documents written in it, basically impossible to decipher for anyone that only learned to write "modern" cursive or even print.
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.
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.
I am really surprised Android won't let the user select their own system font. This is a huge accessibility problem, especially for dyslexics.
So adopting Arabizi without increasing access to education can be expected to do roughly nothing for literacy, whereas with a good education system, people can learn to read and write in Arabic script just fine.
How much of this is still a problem with modern software/font stacks and harfbuzz?
> The inflexibility persisted and has arguably only become more aggravated in the 20th century
What about 21th century? Digital printing can overlap characters just fine. And modern fonts support context sensitive ligatures and glyph substitutions.
Second/third example those seemed to be caused by more by someone who doesn't understand the language copy pasting stuff.
PDF -> that's just PDF being bad. Text and text search in PDFs tends to mes up even or English.
> with unicode number U+0623, but one can also type أ, which is an alif and a high hamza, represented by unicode numbers U+0627 and U+0654.
That's what Unicode normalization and locale settings are for. Same thing applies to large fraction of latin based scripts other than English, anything which has letters with diacritic marks.
> for كثيره and كثيرة will in most cases yield different results
Similar thing in almost any non English language for example cafe and café or ABC and ⒶⒷⒸ. Although at least some systems handle it reasonably. Not sure how much it is heuristics based on large data (hard to scale across software), and how much it's good application of Unicode character decomposition/normal form tables. Which Arabic letters lack appropriate Unicode decomposition (and other) tables and what are the best practices of unicode normalization/decomposition/locale handling for search (applicable for all languages) are more interesting and actionable topics.
> Not even the simple idea of CJK has been implemented.
Many users of CJK language would argue that CJK unification was a mistake. If different languages prefer different forms of the glyph, they should better be separate characters. Having separate Chinese and Japanese fonts because CJK unified too much just introduces additional points of failure.
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).
This repository has a good outlook: https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz-wasm-examples
And as the article says, since most of the writing is happening on computers, stuff like kashida are going to be forgotten soon.
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.
Even before Unicode, it was established practice that documents mixing Chinese and Japanese would use the same encoding for both and roughly nobody would bother to pick an ugly font for the foreign-language text to make it look appropriately different.
Unicode rightly decided that the fine details of appearance are left to fonts. Otherwise you'd also need e.g. a bunch of extra codepoints so that early-20th-century handwritten letters in German can have their look accurately preserved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin
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 to stick to one language by e.g. wrapping <font face=Helvetica>paragraphs and words</font> <font face=Futura>with tags</font>.
My point is, it seems that the author is not aware that each of CJK languages are only understood within each countries, in both writings and speeches, and that's somewhat peculiar.
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...
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 disagree
Argumentum ad populum. There also billions of people using even worse writing systems - non-alphabetical ones. This doesn't mean that they are as good as alphabetical systems like latin.
The video you linked has nothing to do with practicality. It's about calligraphy, which is an art form. It may look good, but it doesn't matter for daily use when one needs to read and type a lot.
All peasant societies were illiterate, including Latin script adopters. Completely irrelevant to Arabic.
"Or even accountants" - apparently, Arabs didn't trade! It's not like Muhammad himself was, you know, a trader and an accountant...
> With some training it's possible to read Arabic texts. But this requires more mental load and practice compared to other alphabetical systems.
Perhaps your brain is too slow. I and many other bilinguals read Arabic even more quickly and efficiently than Latin-script languages. The words are terser and are read as units as opposed to the inefficient character-by-character Latin system. Speed-reading doesn't exist in Arabic because Arabic is already speedily read.
> It may look good, but it doesn't matter for daily use when one needs to read and type a lot.
You just said it was objectively horrible looking above. But consistency cannot be expected of a jumbled mind.
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.
Just a personal esthetic (unpractical) preference.
> It's not optimized for printing and digital fonts I agree. But you can't say it's not useful for daily use.
These two sentences contradict each other. Daily use means printing and reading from screen.
> It's so much easier on paper.
Only if one writes by-hand. Which is unpractical since like press printing has been invented.
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 have widespread alphabet until they needed writing their sacred texts, so, they have invented an alphabet primary designed for that. Other alphabetical systems were already widespread in the regions currently dominated by the Arabic alphabet and many of them look much better.
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.