Re: [doc] Fwd: Research on arabic SIL OFL fonts for making OER

[Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug dot org>]

Hi,

On Mon, Dec 14, 2014 at 03:20:53PM +0000, Ghislain Fabre wrote:
>  Hello,
> 
> I'm actually trying to do an Open educational resource (OER) under CC-BY-SA
> licence for small children to learn and discover languages of the world.
> 
> I would like to do colouring activity with the different alphabet of the
> world (the children colour the letters).
> 
> I'm trying to make it with Arabic, and so I’m testing different OFL SIL
> Arabic font.
> 
> However i don't find an Arabic font which have this characteristics :
> - OFL SIL licence (because GNU GPL seems not be very usable for making OER) ;
> - available in bold (better for making colouring activities) ;
> - standard (not caligraphic or special) ;

I don’t understand this part, standard *is* calligraphic. I just graped
the children reading book my father used to teach me reading when I was
5 years old, and the words are written by a calligrapher in Naskh style
with all the ligatures and stuff you expect from Naskh calligraphy.

> - adapted for learning the correct way for writing Arabic.
> - with diacritics
> 
> Thabit font seems perfect for this, except one problem : when you writte ه
> ههه
> it seems that is not the arabic standard but the Sindhi standard ? (cf.
> http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=Lateef > Language
> specific features )
> Do you know if it's normal ?
> 
> Do you know if there is default version of Thabit ? (not Sindhi ?)

I strongly suggest against using Thabit, it was meant to be a monospaced
font for use in terminal, and it have rather idiosyncratic glyph shapes
and I, being its designer, stopped using it myself. That being said,
that shape of medial Heh, though not common, is not specific to Sindhi
and it is common in Kufi style, for example.

> If no, there is also other very nice fonts (scheherazade, Amiri, XB
> Niloofar...) that are ok with all the characteristics for the pedagogical
> aim, but when you write in inkscape ععع  غ غغغ
> in bold or not in bold, in regular, the "rounds" of غ  are plain and not
> empty, that is not very pedagogical for learning arabic (cf. the screenshot)

That is the way medial Ayn is written in Naskh, Riqaa and Nastaliq (to
name the most widely used Arabic styles), so nothing unusual about it
(the aforementioned book uses it, BTW).

If I were to choose, I’d just use Amiri (I’m biased), and if some of its
ligature seem too exotic for your purpose, then inserting ZWJ between
the ligated characters should break the ligation.

Regards,
Khaled