Nice to hear from you Idris!
I can't help it but when I see verses of Arabic poetry filled with
rectilinear tatweel to have both-side justification, it makes me think
of a typewriter, needless to say that it is horrifying.
Modern fonts with small rectilinear tatweel are OK. But in poetry
tatweel is often quite important, sometimes you have as much tatweel
as letters, in that case it must be curvilinear.
The problem comes from the way Arabic script is segmentated. Breaking
glyphs between letters is a bad choice. Take for example a medial noon
followed by a fah. The stroke starting from the top of the medial noon
and arriving at the highest position of the fah should be unique,
unbreakable and perfectly drawn. When you start breaking it into
pieces and inserting extra stuff you have lost the dynamics of Arabic
script. It woudl be better to have either many of these strokes (with
various widths) or a way to draw them in arbitrary widths, but always
not-broken.
A student of Azzeddine is working on that.
Cheers
Yannis
Le 30 mars 09 à 00:23, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي
حامد a écrit :
On Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:59:14 -0600, Yannis Haralambous <[email protected]
> wrote:
But I believe that straight-line keshideh are very ugly.
In many cases, yes. M$'s 3-level implementation is almost always
ugly. But carefully calibrated, with a good font and appropriately
chosen legal stretching points, there are places where auto-tatweel
is typographically appropriate, like thin columns at small type
sizes, or marginal notes.
Even in old manuscripts you can find horizontal tatweel used in
poetry and the like...
One should be able to produce curvilinear ones.
That is indeed the ideal.
Best wishes
Idris
--
Professor Idris Samawi Hamid, Editor-in-Chief
International Journal of Shi`i Studies
Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523
--
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...pour distinguer l'extérieur d'un
aquarium,
mieux vaut n'être pas
poisson
...the ball I threw while playing in the
park
has not yet reached the
ground
Es gab eine Zeit, wo ich nur ungern über Schubert
sprechen,
nur Nächtens den Bäumen und Sternen von ihm vorerzählen
mögen.
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