Since font disinctions are lost somewhere between my screen and issuance by
qalam (which is apparently no longer moderated?), I will comment only up here.

The textbooks everyone was using in the 1970s, the series by McCarus et al. from
Ann Arbor (year 1, 3 vols., orange; pronouncing and writing, blue; year 2, 2
vols., green) were typed with a Selectric.

(McCarus, BTW, is a Christian Arab -- his name Makarios went into Arabic and
came out in roman looking Irish.)

From whenever Arabic first became part of Windows / Word, the forms were
correctly rendered, albeit with a limited number of ligatures (e.g. in Times New
Roman). In 2002 MS came up with the font "Arabic Typesetting," which has many
more ligatures as well as a roman designed to harmonize with it in biscriptal
text. (I don't know whether it comes with Windows, or only with Office.)

No idea what Mac OS X does with any exotics.

Unicode ranges "Arabic Extended" A and B provide typable citation forms for the
"four" forms of each letter. They work in Word, which doesn't always respect the
Unicode "Non-joiner" etc. items that are supposed to give you the
non-independent forms of letters.

--
no comment on Georgian or anything below

It's hard to find an Armenian font these days that doesn't use a roman <h> for
its /h/ letter.
 --
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...




________________________________
From: Nicholas Bodley <nbodley@...>
To: qalam@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sun, May 29, 2011 12:52:39 PM
Subject: Re: World's last handwritten newspaper

 
On Sun, 29 May 2011 08:11:49 -0400, Peter T. Daniels
<grammatim@...> wrote:

> Vide infra.
> --
> Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: Nicholas Bodley <nbodley@...>
> To: qalam@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Sun, May 29, 2011 4:32:57 AM
> Subject: Re: World's last handwritten newspaper
>

[Following comment assumed to be from P.T.D.; markup failed in Opera
e-mail --nb]

> Lots of examples of ordinary (i.e. messy) handwriting; unfortunately the
> transcriptions into print use an especially ugly typewriter (or
> computer?) naskh-derived font.

That's most unfortunate. I don't think I've seen typeritten Arabic (it
must look rather awful), at least, not recently. Creating text for screens
differes from preparing it for print; print has much better resolution,
although recent screens in handheld devices (such as "smart phones",
really computers) have quite-good resolution.

Looking at the assignment of code points in Unicode for Arabic suggests
that the creators of Unicode have been rather slow to realize how
essential it is to use proper forms (initial, medial, final, and
stand-alone), to have shaping and joining, along with (at least for
Nasta`liq) positioning of (what? Phrases? Letter groups?).

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]