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I am looking for a way to describe in detail an Arabic 3 (٣) http://digs.by/dmKpa9 but I do not know the proper typography terminology. I have been trying to find a way to describe the difference between the top of the ٢ and ٣ basically the difference between one looking like a U and other a W.
Do you have some resources or refences/cheat sheets that you can point me to?
19 Nov 2010 — 10:56am
I could concoct a few things, but I think it might be best
to use "tooth", a standard term in describing Arabic letters.
hhp
19 Nov 2010 — 6:51pm
3 in Arabic = 1 + 3 in Latin?!
Rotate 3 90 CW, and align 1 to the left.
19 Nov 2010 — 7:34pm
That's something Frutiger would do...
http://themicrofoundry.com/image/s_rome3-2.gif
hhp
20 Nov 2010 — 5:08am
I agree with tooth suggestion, that what I'd use myself. Also note that Arabic two can be written with a horizontal stroke with no teeth at all (This what children are taught in Egypt and how I write it by hand myself), but very few fonts implement it. This from KacstOne font.
20 Nov 2010 — 5:59am
Khaaled, that toothless 2 is a great idea, legibility-wise!
hhp
20 Nov 2010 — 6:25am
Indeed, AFAIK it was proposed by the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo specifically to cut the confusion between Arabic 2 and 3.
20 Nov 2010 — 6:27am
So now I'm dying to know: what else did they propose?
hhp
21 Nov 2010 — 10:09am
The Academy is mainly concerned about linguistic issues, but one of their interesting type related proposals was their simplified Arabic typecase where each letter has only two glyphs; one for initial and medial forms and one for isolated and final forms, with the main intent of decreasing time and cost of the printing process. Those that typecase were never used (expect in composing the booklet proposing it), it can be seen in later development's like Linotype Yakout.
There were also some recommendations about the positioning of diacritical dots and vowel marks to make it less ambiguous (calligraphers tend to position them freely on artistic basis, sometimes making text unreadable).
21 Nov 2010 — 10:27am
> Those that typecase were never used
why? publishers didn't like the idea?
21 Nov 2010 — 1:17pm
May be, may be because it were too ugly as Yakout (which implements the same ideas) were picked by newspapers and remains in use even today. Also the largest Egyptian press by then, Bulaq, later simplified their typecase but in a much less drastic way (from 470 to 238 glyphs without counting vowel marks, compared to 135 glyphs in the Academy case including vowel marks).
15 Dec 2010 — 11:07pm
By the way: aren't ٢ and ٣ ligatures of II and III ?