Fonts for Persian

[Knigaman]

I'm sorry to ask here, as it has probably already been discussed many
times before. I am currently using Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit, and
so far I have tested Tahoma, Verdana, Times New Roman and Segoi UI.
None of them seem horrible in rendering Persian. Tahoma seems a little
"twisted", with more curves than you would get in writing. Times New
Roman looks reasonable similar to the script I am used to seeing in
the textbook I am using. And Segoe UI seems to be quite attractive.

Are there any "gotchas" from these fonts, i.e., letters rendered badly
for Persian, as Mr. Esfahbod described in his publication "Persian
Computing with Unicode"?

I like these fonts because of their amazing coverage of so much of the
Unicode spectrum (they seem much better than earlier versions of these
fonts from earlier OS's).

Are there any other high-quality fonts that are Persian specific?

I'm really just trying to get a font that looks most similar to the
print that I see in my textbook, which I hope is close to what you
would see in an Iranian periodical, book or other publication.

[Mohsen Saboorian]

Original font designers are present in this mailing list, but since there is no response here is my two cents.

Here is a list of free and modern Persian fonts proper for 'high quality' printing (some font sets like Borna Rayaneh's are not quite standard, though good for printing)

- XB series fonts

- FarsiWeb fonts

- SIL's (Scheherazade and Lateef) fonts

- Borna Rayaneh series

XB seris fonts are more web-friendly than FarsiWeb's, although their rendering speed is slow. SIL's fonts are originally designed for Arabic scripts. Considering rendering speed and font height and character coverage, Tahoma is the best non-free (and most widely available) font for web rendering IMHO.

Mohsen

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

[Knigaman]

Thanks for the list.

> Here is a list...

> XB seris fonts are more web-friendly than FarsiWeb's, although their
> rendering speed is slow. SIL's fonts are originally designed for Arabic
> scripts. Considering rendering speed and font height and character coverage,
> Tahoma is the best non-free (and most widely available) font for web
> rendering IMHO.

How can a font be more web friendly if very few users have that font
installed? Do you list the best one first in your font enumeration,
and let it "fallback" to Tahoma if the user doesn't have the font?

I'm struggling to get used to the Tahoma "look". There's one character
that looks like a pregnant dung beetle hiding under a blade of grass,
and I can't figure out what it is. With enough samples, I'll get it
figured out.

Loren sZendre

[Connie Bobroff]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 1:46 PM, Knigaman <loren....@gmail.com> wrote:

There's one character
that looks like a pregnant dung beetle hiding under a blade of grass,
and I can't figure out what it is.

 

LOL. That would be the letter "mim".

Note that the mim in traditional "shekaste" style handwriting has the same look as the mim of Tahoma (at least in some forms).

-Connie

[Mohsen Saboorian]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 11:16 PM, Knigaman <loren....@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the list.

> Here is a list...

> XB seris fonts are more web-friendly than FarsiWeb's, although their
> rendering speed is slow. SIL's fonts are originally designed for Arabic
> scripts. Considering rendering speed and font height and character coverage,
> Tahoma is the best non-free (and most widely available) font for web
> rendering IMHO.

How can a font be more web friendly if very few users have that font
installed? Do you list the best one first in your font enumeration,
and let it "fallback" to Tahoma if the user doesn't have the font?

My enumeration was based on richness in Persian characters coverage and elegance on printing (from higher to lower). XB fonts are web-friendly not because many users have them installed, but because their rendering and sizing (specially font height) is reasonable, though rendering time is so high comparing to other fonts in my list.

 

I'm struggling to get used to the Tahoma "look". There's one character
that looks like a pregnant dung beetle hiding under a blade of grass,
and I can't figure out what it is. With enough samples, I'll get it
figured out.

Loren sZendre

--

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

[Sassan YazdanParast]

Hey,


My choice:

"Arial 22px bold" for titles, headlines, "Arial 16px bold" for menu and such.

"Tahoma 11px normal" for tooltips, etc. "Tahoma 12px normal" for texts and "Courier New 12px normal" as an alternative to it.

But if embed, I mean other than these "Web safe fonts", then...

"Yekan 24px normal" for titles and headlines, "Traffic 18px bold"  for the menus etc.

and finally "Nazanin 14px normal" for the texts.



Regards,
Sassan

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 11:16 PM, Knigaman <loren....@gmail.com> wrote:

--

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

[Ehsan Akhgari]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 2:46 PM, Knigaman <loren....@gmail.com> wrote:

How can a font be more web friendly if very few users have that font
installed? Do you list the best one first in your font enumeration,
and let it "fallback" to Tahoma if the user doesn't have the font?

I think the days of looking for a "web-safe" font to use in web apps/pages are nearly over now.  Recent versions of every major browser (that is, Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera, except for Chrome, which has this support turned off by default for now, but soon will be turning it on IINM) now support web fonts using the @font-face CSS rules, so now you are able to actually use the exact font that you want on the web (and let it fall back to a system default font if the browser doesn't support web fonts technology) without having to search for a ubiquitous pre-installed font.

See the following pages as a guide on how to use this technology:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/beautiful-fonts-with-font-face/
http://randsco.com/index.php/2009/07/04/p680

Let's start popularizing this technology.  This is _especially_ important for Persian, since it's been traditionally limited to three basic font styles on the web: Times New Roman, Tahoma and Courier New.  It's time to fix that!

--
Ehsan
<http://ehsanakhgari.org/>

[Knigaman]

On Dec 9, 1:54 pm, Ehsan Akhgari <ehsan.akhg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> See the following pages as a guide on how to use this technology:
>

> http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/beautiful-fonts-with-font-face/http://randsco.com/index.php/2009/07/04/p680

>
> Let's start popularizing this technology.  This is _especially_ important
> for Persian, since it's been traditionally limited to three basic font
> styles on the web: Times New Roman, Tahoma and Courier New.  It's time to
> fix that!

Wow, I'm out of date on keeping up with new technology! I was not
aware you could dynamically refer to a font, like you can an image or
other resource. Of course, you would want to be careful as to which
servers/organizations you link to.

So, are you trying to get web designers to standardize on a particular
font or set of fonts?

Loren sZendre

[Ehsan Akhgari]

Actually, I'm all for allowing them to use whatever fonts (note that a page can render text in multiple fonts!) they see fit for their particular design.

--
Ehsan
<http://ehsanakhgari.org/>

[Knigaman]

OK, I've downloaded a lot of fonts. The fonts that come with windows
all chop of the "e" Harakat! Almost all the other fonts (that I
downloaded yesterday) work fine with the various Karakat. The XB
Shiraz seems to work nicely as an all around font.

Because my software (web or desktop version) displays the full form
along with the normal form -- I cannot use any of the included fonts.

So far I think I will only need 2 forms in the native script.

Loren sZendre