A Selectric ball carried 92 glyphs, and they were very cleverly designed. Arabic instructional materials from the 1970s were frequently typed that way (see the Michigan materials -- writing in light blue, first-year 3v. in orange, second-year 2v. in green).


These days, Windows and Word have no trouble typing in Arabic (and Persian and Urdu, at least) with no difficulty at all. And you don't have to buy anything extra.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...

----- Original Message ----

From: Nicholas Bodley <nbodley@...>
To: qalam@yahoogroups.com
Cc: loopback-sent <nbodley@...>
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2008 4:18:00 PM
Subject: Fwd: Typeset and typewritten Arabic before computer typesetting



Dear Qalamites,

While not strictly on-topic, this message (a reply to a message I'd sent) seemed
to be of uncommon interest. Mr. Hosny is one of the people who are localizing the
XO (One Laptop Per Child -- OLPC computer) software and (perhaps) firmware.
Perhaps it's being excessively cautious, but I have deleted his e-mail address
as a courtesy.

I fairly recently joined the Localization list at OLPC, and in response to a
question, offered a rather-long message describing what's involved in
working with RtoL, Arabic, and other RtoL scripts. I was out of date, and
the replies were most courteous; perhaps the message was not useless.

----- Original Message -----
From: Khaled Hosny
To: Nicholas Bodley nbodley@... net>
Sent: Wed Jul 30 18:12
Subject: Fwd: Re: [Localization] Arabic Projects

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 01:09:35PM -0400, Nicholas Bodley wrote:

> On Wed Jul 30 11:44 , Khaled Hosny sent:

[KH]
> >Arabic typewriters used what so called "Simplified Arabic script" where
> >each letter has only 2 forms (on used as isolated and final, and the
> >other as initial and medial) reducing the number of needed glyph while
> >remaining acceptably readable.

[nb]
> Most interesting! Did the Shift key select the other form for a given letter?
> For such people as students of writing systems and typography, it would be good
> to have some images of typewritten Arabic on the Web.

Yes, shift used to select the isolated/final form, unfortunately I
couldn't find such samples on the web (I should remove the dust from my
father's typewriter and make some samples).

[KH]
> >If by "mechanically" you mean metal type,

[nb]
> I did.

[KH]
> >then Arabic printing houses as early as 1800's produced very carefully typeset
> >Arabic books that we yet to have a computer system that can imitate.

[nb]
> That's just fascinating. I would not have thought it possible. I do hope that
> somebody has saved a few fonts of type from that period. One would think that
> there was quite a large number of different sorts (glyphs) in a given typeface.
> As well, one wonders whether the body of each piece was only a rectangle, or
> whether some more sophisticated scheme was worked out.

They used extensive sets of hundreds of glyphs with tens of contextual variants
of each glyph.

Here are two scans from a Mushaf printed in 1924 using metal type, this
is one of the finest metal typesetted books.
http://www.tafsir org/vb/attachmen t.php?attachment id=850&stc= 1&d=1180677875
http://www.tafsir org/vb/attachmen t.php?attachment id=851&stc= 1&d=1180678163
(Note that Sura heads are calligraphed while the body of the page is
composed).

[I looked up some definitions: A Mushaf is apparently the Qur'an,
bound in one volume.
[Tafsir refers to commentaries on the Qur'an. Editing the URL to substitute
a few other 3-digit numbers in place of "850" and "851" brought up some
pages, completely in Arabic, as well as .doc-formatted files
that seemed to render quite well in a recent version of OpenOffice.org for
Windows XP SP2.
[Sura, also Surah -- pl. Suar or Suwar, are chapters of the Qur'an. -- nb]]]

[nb]
> I think these details would be of interest to subscribers to the Qalam mailing
> list on yahoogroups. com. That list (only sporadically active) is for people
> interested in writing systems, and sometimes branches out a bit into linguistics
> and typography.
>
> Perhaps I could forward your message to that list, with your permission (also
> with OLPC's permission).

Of course you can :)

Regards,
Khaled

--
Khaled Hosny
Arabic localizer and member of Arabeyes.org team

(If you see duplicate[s] of this message, I apologize.
This Web mail software is not professional, although
the rest of Speakeasy's services are very good. --nb)

--
Nicholas Bodley
Waltham, Mass.
Sent from Speakeasy.net web mail

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