On Mon, 15 Sep 2003 10:18:15 +0200, Marco Cimarosti
<marco.cimarosti@...> wrote:

> Nakanishi treats Urdu as a separate "alphabet" from Arabic, probably
> because it is (was?) not customary to typeset Urdu: all text on Urdu
> newspapers is (was?) handwritten by a calligrapher.

(Comments by a dilettante, who would welcome corrections:)

I have been quite aware of this; I'm reasonably sure calligraphy (by hand,
of course) still rules the day. It's not too hard to find out; I think I
could find an Urdu newspaper in Cambridge, Mass, which is nearby.

[Typed earlier:]
I found this fascinating, especially after having read the beautiful
Scientific American article about Arabic typography. Urdu script is really
ornate, with lots of added strokes, I feel fairly safe in saying. Its
script style has a name, perhaps Nastaliq, that describes the style.

(Naskh is another; Sci. Am. gave clear examples of about five different
principal styles of Arabic script. Apparently, only well-educated Arabic
speakers/writers know of these names of the various styles. Courteous
inquiries of middle-class Arabic speakers have "drawn blanks".)

> OTHO,

(Sorry; mind's not at its clearest... OTHO? I'm thinking "on the other
hand" ... ... ...
AHA! Transposition! Most-popualr typo. :) OK...)

> Arabic and Persian newspapers are normally typeset and calligraphy, if
> any, is only used for the titles.

Yrs trly has long been pestering a nice software company to make its
product handle Arabic (and Hebrew) script properly. It has come to pass.
In the process [I] became quite aware of "Initial, medial, final, and
isolated", as a well as "arabjoining" and shaping. The Sci. Am. article
said that typesetting Arabic acceptably *requires* computers. Apparently,
Urdu requires such elaborate attention to many details that, afaik,
newspapers are still printed from handwritten images; nobody, apparently,
has succeeded in creating the requisite code (software).

While exploring Arabic-language news sources a while back, I discovered
that rather than try to expect a Web browser to render Arabic properly,
many provide links (encoded in Latin-1!) to Adobe PDF page files; reading
news at those sites requires ability to read PDF in Arabic. One site is
proud of this technical advance, and imho they have a right to be.

For the record, I do *not* know Arabic to any significant degree at all.
About the only text I can recognize is an initial "al-". However, the
script no longer looks peculiar, and I think I can distinguish some letter
boundaries, but am not sure.

I'm doing what I shouldn't, on two counts; replying only (at the moment)
to Marco Cimarosti's messages, and also not reading all of them, first!
I'm trying to learn to cope with e-mail overload. Curiosity can be a
vice...

Mr. (Dr.?) Pournader probably has some interesting and enlightening
comments, as well.

My regards to all,
--
Nicholas Bodley |=@=| Waltham, Mass.
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