At 10:47 11/14/2002, Lars Marius Garshol wrote:

>| - In calligraphic Arabic, some letters go below the preceding
>| letter, rather than on its side. If many such "descending letter"
>| follow each other in a word, the height of the line of text
>| containing that word must be increased accordingly. But this
>| characteristic is not easily reproduced in typography so, in modern
>| printed texts, all letters follow each other horizontally.
>
>Does Nashtaliq have this characteristic? From what I've seen of it it
>seems to, but there could be other reasons as well.

Every Arabic calligraphy style contains vertical as well as horizontal
connections, even the very horizontal kufic style. See Thomas Milo's essay
on Arabic in the new _Language Culture Type_ book for examples.

>And is it true that Nashtaliq writing is still drawn by hand in
>Pakistani newspapers?

I believe headlines are still frequently done in this way, but I'm not sure
about text. It is possible to produce authentic nastaliq typesetting with
OpenType, but I have not seen any really good designs yet. I met a
Pakistani font developer who is working on it at the Microsoft OT font
workshop in August. In order to get the diagonal positioning correct
relative to the baseline, you need to employ reverse chaining contextual
lookups. Very complicated.

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@...

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