Re: A good vocalized font for non-Arab speakers

["Afief Halumi" <afief dot h at gmail dot com>]

Hey,

A lot of work has been going into the fonts recently, but
unfortunately the people who work on the fonts are not necessarily the
people who use the fonts on a daily basis(I know Khaled Hosney does
use them, but I for example hardly ever type anything arabic, even my
interface is english) Therefore there has been a lack of testing and
pretty much no bugreports being posted. If you would be kind enough to
voice your problems and tell us what you think can be done better it
surely will help raise the font quality.

so your bugs as I read them are:
Al-Mohannad:
* the distance after initial and medial waw.
* dagger over shaddah in god's name is too small.
* fatha over shaddah are too far apart

I do not understand what you mean with "fatha shadda fatha *followed
by* tha fatha" but I asume it's simply a case of too many diacritics
running into one another, this is hard to fix as it needs lots of
checking with individual letters...

I'll check out Al-Mohannad and see what can be done about the three
bugs you have mentioned above.

Afief

On Dec 21, 2007 11:04 AM, Bokverket <bokverket at hotmail dot com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am a publisher and I have been looking for some time for an Arabic font to
> publish texts for beginning learners of Arabic, for example a beginner's
> Swedish--Arabic--Swedish dictionary. These have to be fully vocalized and
> easily readable -- like when you yourselves started to write :-)  The
> previous free fonts that I have checked do a horrible job with the
> diacritics, as I am sure you know.
>
> So naturally I was very excited when I found the announcement on Arabeyes
> that you had done just that. I have looked at many of them, and to my
> greater and greater disappointment they were either adaptions of common
> newsprint typefaces or art-forms of varius kinds.  I may have missed out
> (please correct me), but not many seemed to be well suited for running text
> even (like books or in magazines). They were more for headings, shop signs
> etc. Finally I came upon AlMohanad which was the only one that might fit.
>
> I am very much aware of the impressive job that has been done to prepare the
> ligature tables for all combinations, and I am a little surprised that not
> much comment has been seen on this list. Is it the right place?  One would
> hope that the work with the ligature tables could be re-used by the
> individual font designer, but there are traps. For instance, one font with
> very long fathas has them running into the next letter.
>
> For AlMohanad, I wonder about the distance after initial and medial waw. It
> is as big, maybe even bigger optically, than a word space. Confusing for
> beginners. The dagger over a shadda, as in God's name, is very small. The
> fatha over shadda is placed way too high, no feeling of contact between
> them,  kasra below shadda is well done.
>
> For other fonts, Mashq, Tholoth, AlArabiya and possibly others have problems
> with ha fatha shadda fatha *followed by* tha fatha. The shadda runs into the
> second fatha. The shadda seems to be placed way to high, even if not
> followed by s "sensitive" letter.  The dagger sign disappears over a shadda.
>
> I wonder if someone could take a font such as Bitstream Cyberbase and
> improve it with your diacritics tables. That font really looks very clear
> for beginners. If only the Latin letters would be lined up with the Arabic
> ones...
>
> Best,
>
> Goran
>
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