Re: A good vocalized font for non-Arab speakers

["Bokverket" <bokverket at hotmail dot com>]

I'd suggest SIL's Scheherazade font[1] for you, or our Simplified Naskh
font[2] which is based on the previous font, but addresses some issues
in it, basically Simplified Naskh has larger glyphs and replaces some
incorrect glyphs in Scheherazade font with correct one, though it is not
released yet as there are few fixes that I want to do before an official
release.

-- But do they have the wonderful diacritics placement mechanism 
incorporated?  That's critical  (pun intended).

I totally agree with you, I'm in the process of including more fonts
that are suitable normal and on screen usage.
AND
> 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...
>
I'd like to fix it, only if it is released under a free license.

-- How about SIL's fonts, the ones you mention? Or CyberBase. Surely this is 
such a specialized job that all good forces must work together.  Cyberbase 
is freely downloadable, does anyone know what type of owner Bitstream is?

> individual font designer, but there are traps. For instance, one font with
> very long fathas has them running into the next letter.
I'm not sure what you are talking about here, as Arabeyes fonts in
general has very few ligatures, may be you mean substitution tables for
initial/medial/final forms?
-- No, as in my post a few mintes ago, I mean critical combinations of 
letters with diacritics (bigrams).

The waw issue is due to lack of kerning, one could use simple techniques
like decreasing the width of the waw making its tail extend out of its
box, but this will interfere with dotted letters like beh or yeh. The
other issues have been fixed now, thanks for reporting it.
-- I am not totally familiar with kerning vs. placements in Uniscribe, maybe 
bigrams that get ugly should really be treated by the kerning mechanism. The 
space after a waw obviously have to be decreased, yet taking into account a 
following beh or yeh, so it's a question of some bigram combinations there, 
too.

Best,

Goran