August 15th, 2011 by
A beta of Ubuntu Font Family Arabic, in print as part of the testing and debugging process for the Arabic coverage. The Arabic script support will cover Arabic, Urdu, Pashto, Kashmiri and other written languages using the base Arabic script.
The magazine is an intriguing tri-lingual production published by the Cultural Office of Saudi Arabia in Germany with the layout prepared by Professor Rayan Abdullah’s team at Markenbau. The magazine starts with German and English articles using Latin script at one cover (reading left-to-right) and articles written in Arabic from the other cover (reading right-to-left).
Following on from the recent posts about adding Kashmiri/Pashto ringed characters and the Arabic update from the start of 2011, the most significant change to highlight is the that the diagonal dots (ʾiʿǧām / إعجام) have been changed to a horizontal layout.
The resulting arrangement is now closer to an equilateral triangle, and the dots closer to a circle.
(Thank you to Abdallah, Björn Ali Göransson, Chamfay, Masoud, Muhammad Negm, Nizarus, Reda Lazr and others who each took the time to comment and give feedback about the earlier diagonal dot angle).
The toolkit
16 Responseshide comments
Japnese and Chinese next please?
Nicholas/Brian: It’s a very big (probably 10-year!) project. CJKV is huge. 10,000–80,000 for each of Simplified, Traditional, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean—plus regional localised variations.
In order to start on doing this it will need some local contacts; the type of people that need finding are:
There are additionally various government minimum coverage standards and requirements that need to be met (different for each jurisdiction. This bureaucracy needs taking care of to ensure that the initial design is going to adapt to the full coverage. Arne Goetje is a useful person in this regard and knows a lot of the background.
In the short-term, it’s probably most useful to help out with the WenQuanYi project to get Wenq up to full-coverage and quality first. After the process has been debugged and understand, it should be possible to apply some of what’s been learn to Ubuntu for each of CJKV. The useful thing about Han (and Ubuntu Mono) is that there aren’t metrics issues—it is possible to go back and fix bugs post-release without the risk of document reflow.
In the medium-term, would either of you in the position to start building a team of contacts, font designers and testers? Finally, we collectively need to work out how to fund such an enormous project. Canonical has kindly bootstrapped the typeface by funding a broad collection of font weights and coverage for five initial scripts (Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin), but that’s only the beginning in order to get the Ubuntu Font Family project rolling and on course with a good wind behind it.
Hi, I showed your Arabic font to a friend of mine who is from Morocco, and she said it was really pretty and easy to read. Good job!
Also, do you have a timeline for when you think you will start/finish with Chinese and Japanese script?
Thanks!
For not at all, it’s always a pleasure to help in such projects
Good continuation.
This is relay amazing
Can not wait to try it
Thank you
me too
THANKS
so i like free software
This is GREAT, Now it is more ACCURATE
Thanks to feedback
The change to dots arrangement makes it prettier and easier to read. Keep up the good job.
I think second image has wrong “alt” and “title” attributes.
It’s great to see another post from design team.
mmiicc: That’s the level of attention-to-detail that we love in the design team! Fixed and many appreciations for spotting it.
Stunning. Beautiful.
So exciting to think that such a high quality, modern-design Arabic typeface will soon be freely available. Thank you very much for your hard work on this project!
The magazine looks fantastic and really shows off the font well. Making the dots horizontal was definitely a good choice.
I’m just wondering if the team has explicitly rejected the idea of reducing the height of the second and third “teeth” in س|ش that was mentioned in the comments in the last post about the Kashmiri ring? It seems to me that’s the last potential jarring feature in the design. For example in a word like المستوى (subtitle paragraph on left hand page, fourth line down), the equal proportions of the siin and the adjacent ta’ give the siin undue dominance in the overall feel of the text.
Keep up the good work! I can’t wait to try it for myself!
(PS just out of interest, can anyone work out what typeface the body text in the magazine is set in?)
Phil: You’ve got good eye-sight! You’re unlikely to have seen the Arabic body typeface either before. It’s a beta of Cordale Arabic, one of Dalton Maag’s other library typefaces that is also being extended to cover Arabic through a collaboration of Rayan Abdullah and Dalton Maag. Apart from a brief mention in DM’s newsletter from March 2009 it’s still a bit secret!
I’ll do a bit of research about the cascading of the stems in Seen (it’s not in the bugtracker). Generally it’s useful if you’ve been able to test a font in day-to-day usage for a week or so, as this helps to filter out which issues are knee-jerk reactions and which are genuine long-term sticking issues that need fixing. When I get a new snapshot of the Ubuntu Arabic for testing from Dalton Maag (the most recent I have is from six months ago), I’d be happy to pass this along for some beta-testing—of course, in the long run it will go into the main public beta testing too.
Thank you for the quick response! Really glad you shared the big “secret” – that’s a fascinating design, having mirror image serifs on the Arabic and Latin ascenders. Very nicely done.
Back to Ubuntu – it’s a good point about everyday use being required to find the real issues, and if you are able to send the next new version for testing when it is available I would be very grateful to be involved in the process. Cascading the stems isn’t necessarily the only means of differentiating them from ta/ba/tha etc.; spacing might also be worth looking into. And one other thing I can’t help mentioning is the lack of a descender in the medial ha (as in فهي, last word on 5th line of intro paragraph): as one of the few descenders in the script, it might actually be quite an important clue for the eye. I appreciate there are other (primarily Kufic) designs in which the medial ha matches the initial, but it is probably worth bearing this in mind as a potential problem when testing. Many thanks again!
probably a big improvement over dots. i suggest widening glyphs a bit compared to their heights. it makes them more proportion and easy on the eyes. thanks for your effort guys
The font is outstanding !