Font issues and Heh Goal. Was: Perso-Arabic symbols for "year"

[Connie Bobroff]

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Khaled Hosny <khale...@eglug.org> wrote:

 

That is by design, almost all Arabic fonts are ridiculously too small
compared to Latin for reason beyond me, making it impossible to use the
same point size for Arabic and non-Arabic text.

Right. I was told they do that because the harakaat often get cut off. However, it does not solve the problem because people simply increase the fontsize and the now bigger harakaat get cut off! 

> (However, for this particular project, unfortunately, I won't be able
> to use it since the Heh Goal is not the right shape to match the old
> style manuscript.)

So for Amiri, being a Naskh style font,
I decided that this variance makes no sense and does not match the
design so I ignored it, however if there is evidence of manuscripts in
Naskh style making that distinction I'll happily follow it.

I guess you want "proof" that in one font, someone would like to type both regular Heh and Heh Goal. Here are some PDFs with authentic, normal, everyday Persian handwriting:

http://persian.nmelrc.org/courses/dikte.html

(see "Answer Key" column.) As you can see, Iranians like to use the regular Heh for initial and medial and Heh Goal for final position. Some of the handwriting is more nasta`liq-like and some is more naskh-like, depending on the individual.

You may also need both hehs in certain pedagogical situations such as the project I'm working on. I'm trying to help people decipher an old manuscript by retyping the nasta`liq letter forms in easier-to-read naskh. If I retype it in nasta`liq, it will be almost the same as the original and the users will copy and paste it into Notepad to make it easier to read (in Tahoma!)!

 

Otherwise, you are right. I can't think of any Persian (or Arabic, Turkish...) naskh manuscript with Heh Goal. Surely there must be at least one out there!

 

But you should add Heh Goal to your font because if there is some text which was originally typed in a nasta`liq font and that text is copied and pasted into a search engine or some place where there is no CSS, there will be problems. This is just a functional and technical reason.

 

We'd better let others give their opinions first though. I hope there can be some discussion.

 

[Khaled Hosny]

On Tue, Jun 05, 2012 at 09:35:35AM +0530, Connie Bobroff wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Khaled Hosny <khale...@eglug.org> wrote:
>
>  
> That is by design, almost all Arabic fonts are ridiculously too small
> compared to Latin for reason beyond me, making it impossible to use the
> same point size for Arabic and non-Arabic text.
>
> Right. I was told they do that because the harakaat often get cut off. However,
> it does not solve the problem because people simply increase the fontsize and
> the now bigger harakaat get cut off! 

I use larger font ascent/descent, it will increase default interline
spacing but that is an acceptable trade off, and any decent text layout
software allows adjusting interline spacing any way.

> > (However, for this particular project, unfortunately, I won't be able
> > to use it since the Heh Goal is not the right shape to match the old
> > style manuscript.)
>
> So for Amiri, being a Naskh style font,
> I decided that this variance makes no sense and does not match the
> design so I ignored it, however if there is evidence of manuscripts in
> Naskh style making that distinction I'll happily follow it.
>
> I guess you want "proof" that in one font, someone would like to type both
> regular Heh and Heh Goal.

More like evidence of the Nastaliq-like Heh ever being used in Naskh
calligraphy. The main issue is that such shapes are align to Naskh style
and forcing them into a Naskh font gives an inferior and inconsistent
mixture, just like would would happen if one used a Naskh-like closed
final Heh in a Nastliq font, it just does not fit in.

> Here are some PDFs with authentic, normal, everyday
> Persian handwriting:
> http://persian.nmelrc.org/courses/dikte.html
> (see "Answer Key" column.) As you can see, Iranians like to use the regular Heh
> for initial and medial and Heh Goal for final position. Some of the handwriting
> is more nasta`liq-like and some is more naskh-like, depending on the
> individual.

That is a mere of a stylistic variant, and clearly influenced by Nastliq
calligraphy, however such open final Heh indeed exist in Naskh
calligraphy as a stylistic variant (see attached images) but it can only
be used in certain contexts unlike Riqa’a calligraphy, for example,
where both forms are interchangeable. Either case it is still merely
another form of Heh not a different character, and I've never seen the
initial form used in Naskh calligraphy (as compared to digital fonts).

> You may also need both hehs in certain pedagogical situations such as the
> project I'm working on. I'm trying to help people decipher an old manuscript by
> retyping the nasta`liq letter forms in easier-to-read naskh. If I retype it in
> nasta`liq, it will be almost the same as the original and the users will copy
> and paste it into Notepad to make it easier to read (in Tahoma!)!

An interesting use case, but I don’t see why you need a Nastaliq-like
Heh if you are typing in Naskh either it is the easy to read Naskh or
the not so easy to read Nastaliq, but I don’t see how borrowing from one
to another makes any sense (BTW I don’t know why people find Nastaliq
hard to read, I read it as fast as Naskh even though it is not as common
in this part of the world).

> Otherwise, you are right. I can't think of any Persian (or Arabic, Turkish...)
> naskh manuscript with Heh Goal. Surely there must be at least one out there!
>  
> But you should add Heh Goal to your font because if there is some text which
> was originally typed in a nasta`liq font and that text is copied and pasted
> into a search engine or some place where there is no CSS, there will be
> problems. This is just a functional and technical reason.

IMO, the encoding of Heh Goal is one of the many Unicode mistakes when
it comes to Arabic, it is just like encoding an italic single storey a
so that people could replicate italic manuscripts using roman fonts but
keeping the italic a.

This is different from Yeh Barree or Swash Kaf which, though are
considered stylistic variants in Arabic, serve as different letters in
other orthographies.

Regards,
Khaled

[John Hudson]

On 05/06/2012 1:55 AM, Khaled Hosny wrote:

> More like evidence of the Nastaliq-like Heh ever being used in Naskh

> calligraphy. The main issue is that such shapes are [alien] to Naskh style

> and forcing them into a Naskh font gives an inferior and inconsistent
> mixture, just like would would happen if one used a Naskh-like closed
> final Heh in a Nastliq font, it just does not fit in.

This is a valid comment. However, for technical reasons it has become
standard for almost all Arabic fonts to support the Urdu orthography,
regardless of whether those fonts are in a style appropriate to Urdu or
whether they are able to convincingly represent letters that, as Khaled
notes, originate in the particularities of the nastaliq style. This is
because the Windows 8-bit Arabic codepage, around which so many fonts
are built, supports Arabic, Persian and Urdu. Typically the Urdu support
in such fonts is relatively unrefined: the barri yeh, for example, tends
to extend far to the left of the preceding letter, rather than sweeping
under it; this is because the technical issues of spacing and mark
positioning for the subtending barri yeh are very complex.

All that said, it should be noted that Uyghur uses the double-eye heh
character, and despite historically being written in nastaliq is now
frequently encountered in modern 'neo-naskh' typography. So there is an
example of a nastaliq form forced into a naskh style of font by the
requirements of the orthography and typographic fashion.

http://www.tiro.com/John/UighurShaping.gif


JH

[Connie Bobroff]

John,

Your Uyghur example was very educational. Thanks for that. I think all we need now is an example of the Heh Goal variant with the hook underneath used in naskh to complete the picture.

Khaled,

Your heh_forms2.jpg is great (and thank you for circling the two instances.) This example alone should justify adding Heh Goal (I mean this shape, no matter what the name) to a naskh font. I understand it may not be appropriate for Amiri but for other naskh fonts.
One important point is that some of these variants which are merely decorative in Persian have a functional use in Urdu. See this useful page on Urdu:

http://patriot.net/~abdali/urdumac.html#OrthographicHints

...."Goal Hay" ہ , ... is pronounced separately by itself rather than being just used to "aspirate" another consonant. For example, the "Hay" sound is pronounced independently in the word "kahaa" كہا (said); so this word is typed with a "Goal Hay", as K, O, A. This is in contrast to the word "khaa" كھا (Eat!) where the "Hay" is used to aspirate the "k" sound; so this word is spelled with a "Dochashmi Hay", as K, H, A....

 

There is no coordination between Persian and Urdu computing so we run into problems in the situation of re-typing 100 year-old manuscripts from a more globalistic age.

 

Anyhow, from a practical point of view, how would you type all these variants if there were no Heh Goal character in Unicode? If it is the job of the font, how would you do it? It seems like it would involve a lot of complicated css. Is there a way that is currently possible to do this? I don't think it would work for web use. Still it would be nice to know what might be a better way.

 

Khaled, you have some special gift if you can read nasta`liq as comfortably as naskh even though you are not exposed to it so much!

 

 

JH

--
http://persian-computing.org/
http://groups.google.com/group/persian-computing/