Kashida in Arabic script

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Posted by: Yasser
         

Salam,

I'm doing a research about digital Arabic fonts; I was wondering if there's some way to create kashida and make it scalable depending on the justification of the text for example. Or generally speaking, is there a way to make the width of some Arabic letters like the final 'nun' or the final 'kaf' not fixed "also depending on the justification of the text"? And if there’s a way to implement so, then how & using what tools?

 

Thank you

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Posted by: Dr_Hamed2
         

salam,

 

Let us suppose that you have two versions of final noon. If, whenever you precede the final noon with tatweel, you substitute the elongated noon for the tatweel and short final noon, you should get the desired effect. The same applies to final beh, kef, lem etc.

 

This may be one way to do it.

 

I'm not sure how to apply the same to isolated letters, such as noon, yeh, beh (et al), lem etc

 

Best regards

 

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Posted by: Yasser
         

dear, Dr Hamed

thanks for contribution, so you're suggesting having 2 versions or forms of the letter we wish to enlong "final noon, beh,.. etc" one form is normal & the other is with tatweel, my quesion here is, will that noon with tatweel have a fixed tatweel or width? or can it be more flixable & scalable as we need it for the text?

thanks again

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Posted by: MeorRidzuan
         
Yaseer,
If you are looking into standard way of achieving it, the best bet is using JALT table. However, I think Paul Nielson  mentioned that no software from MS support that table. So, in short, there is no software can do it in a standard way...

If you are thinking of creating a software, I would suggest try to use JALT, of any other standard OT tables. If you do not want to use it, there are other many ways you can achieve it.

If you can come up with a software to support JALT, I'm more than happy to add it to my font.

Regards.

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Posted by: Yasser
         

Those replies were indeed useful but, I don’t know maybe I didn’t put the question right, what I wanted to ask about: Is it possible to render glyphs on spot while writing the text? As we’ll get the desired width from the justification engine and if the character allows tatweel we render it with the desired width (and I’m not talking about having a lot of alternative glyphs with variation of sizes to replace the glyph, I’m talking about a more flexible, dynamic, on spot rendring)?

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Posted by: Dr_Hamed2
         

Salaam

 

I don't think the OpenType technology supports the type of flexibility you are looking for directly, at least not yet. That's why I suggested one possible workaround, based on the rules of Naskh script that allow alternate elongated forms of certain letters.

 

The other point you might care to look into is justification and its algorithms. I believe the current justification algorithms were developed for Latin based scripts; they are not too well suited to Arabic, I'm afraid.

 

Best bregards

[ArchivePoster]

Posted by: Bob H
         

I believe what you are looking for is what I have heard called "ductile glyphs" -- glyph outlines that can stretch or shrink "on the fly" to achieve desired spacing and justification.

 

Indeed, OpenType does not support this kind of mechanism.  Rather, OpenType supports only glyph selection and glyph positioning.

 

Bob

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Posted by: Aref3
         

I too think that it is so strange of Microsoft to come up with an opentype language, and still not support all of it. Jalt tables is the best way to acheive kashida in arabic scripts. Rather, microsoft uses a very silly technique to achieve tatweel like effect in ms word 2007. Havent got any idea what Bill Gates has in his mind?

All my arabic fonts works best with old school wordpad...................  but donot support fully office2007!

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