This is a lengthy email containing useless stuff, you have been warned. On Sat, Feb 16, 2008 at 01:59:43AM +0200, Anas R. wrote: > Dear Khaled, > > Giga thanx for your great effort.. this font is the 'most wanted' arabic font. > > - I think that it should be designed for printing perposes, not for GUI/Web/Screen usage. > The alternative here is something like Tahoma - a sans-serif font, which is Dejavu, which still need optimizing, Well, you can consider this a sort of Sans Arabic font, I'm one of the people who use Sans font in their UI and as default web font. Indeed we need a Sans-Serif font, DejaVu looks too ugly in my eyes to be considered, but I was considering AlMothnna which is bold only and needs a normal weight. > and I think that Linux Desktops (kde/gnome) should prevent 'smooth-edges' or 'anti-aliasing' for this kind of font. > - I prefer an English font name, not an Arabic -- to keep the consistancy of the System-font-list. If you are using an English interface, you will see an English name, but I'm a fan of localization and I believe that every thing that can be localized should be localized. > - لفظ الجلالة dosen't look good. Ironically, I was considering this one of the improvements that I made over the original font, but you are right, it is some what out of context being too classic than the rest of the font, I'll try to find a more consistent glyph for it ISA. > - Still need caring of التراكبات Unfortunately I'm not going to do this for that font, as you might know this font is a forked version of SIL's Scheherazade font, the way it was designed makes it to difficult to extend and attempting to added all the needed ligatures and glyph variants will make it unmaintainable and might break lots of stuff. The fact that this font isn't intended for typesetting documents makes this a minor issue. However, in the short term (not so short), I'm considering tow brand new fonts from scratch. A font based on the famous Arabic typeface designed in Bulaq Press [1] around 1815 in Cairo, that is the most used Arabic typeface in printing since then and I believe that it is the only carefully designed Arabic typeface ever. Though there is that font has been "digitalized" and it can be seen in Linotype Arabic fonts and its descendants (like MS's Traditional Arabic and the font we have here), but these fonts are either not publicly available or poorly designed with incomplete set of ligatures and some times wrong ones. This will take sometime and lots of effort, so don't expect any thing soon. The other font that I'm thinking in is a sans-serif like font based on Cairo Metro signs, if you happen to be in Cairo you might have seen that font and liked it like me :) This photo [2] shows and example (I can't find a better one) and the designed should be in public domain (I'm not a designer, don't blame me if I can't design new typefaces). Sorry for the long, unrelated stuff, but I felt like expressing some of my thoughts. -- 1. http://www.bibalex.org/BulaqPress/En/Bulaq.htm 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sadat_metro_station_entrance_at_Midan_Tahrir_in_Cairo.jpg -- Khaled Hosny
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