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

[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 <khaledhosny at 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
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