Mastodawn

“The reply took and the closure of the ticket took half an hour or so. The reasons behind it took five hundred years to pile up, and they involve a twice-mutilated vizier, a Qurʾān that vanished for four centuries, a Beirut newspaperman with a deadline, and an Egyptian physician who taught himself font engineering for fun (or that what I imagine about him). Walking through these, ended up to be the most enjoyable couple of weeks in that job, and I want to go through it here too.”

I haven't read this yet, but how could I not?

https://lr0.org/blog/p/arabic/

An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt | La Vita Nouva

Once upon a time, a frontend ticket landed on my queue which was not properly mine, but the only other Arabic reader on the team was on leave. It went roughly as follows; a block of mixed-content Arabic prose on the …

La Vita Nouva

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Mark Dominus Jun 13

This article on Arabic script typesetting and justification is turning out even better than I had hoped.

“My favourite resident of the block, and one of my favourite characters in all of Unicode, is U+FDFD, ﷽ : four-word invocation, bismillāh ar-raḥmān ar-raḥīm, as a single codepoint. A monument from the era when rendering was baked into the encoding because nobody trusted the renderer to do anything, preserved forever, like a fly in amber that recites.”

https://lr0.org/blog/p/arabic/

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Mark Dominus Jun 14

This character is amazing. Here's the glyph for it on my Android phone. I spent a fun fifteen or thirty minutes figuring out how it was composed. “Bismillah”, it transpires, is a contraction of “bismi Allah” (“in the name of God”), and in this one the "bismi" starts at farthest right and runs all the way through the tall part of the "ar-" in "ar-raḥman", with the ‘m’ part over on the left, and the mim's hanging final tail joining up with the ‘n’ of raḥman.

The "Allah" part is atop that, in the middle.

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Mark Dominus Jun 14

Now I have an exciting new evening activity: take something like this, which says “bismi Allah al-Raḥman al-Raḥim” and figure out _how_. There must be 19 letters, but where are they exactly?

The Wikipedia page has a dozen or two of these puzzles, and there must be thousands more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basmala#Gallery

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Khaled Hosny

@mjd These are read from down up, but the name of God is always put on top regardless of the reading order. It is also a really bad calligraphy (computer generated/assisted). Any calligrapher worth their salt would not distribute the alifs so randomly or do this twisted lam-reh-hah thing.