Sci Am Re: scripts page

Nicholas Bodley wrote:

> 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".)

No one in the modern world knows exactly what all six of the classical
calligraphic labels mean (see WWS and references given there), but Naskh
and Nasta'liq and Kufic should all be familiar.

> 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,

Was this a recent article?

Sci.Am. seems to be upholding its usual standards in our fields ...
printers in Bulaq (Cairo) were doing superb work toward the end of the
19th century, which one book (I can't remember where I read it) said
approached ms. quality. Of course they used hundreds and hundreds of
sorts of ligatures and such.

> 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.

There aren't any letter boundaries (except for the non-connectors, of
course).
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...