The Challenge of Foreign Typography

Dec 25, 2003 5:32 PM
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Speaking of fonts, these articles on rendering complex diacritics (accent marks) and letter shapes and printing in languages that don't follow the European (left-right top-bottom) flow make me understand why Donald Knuth finds fonts to be a worthwhile challange.

(also via Ned)


Comments: The Challenge of Foreign Typography

sil.org got one point wrong, IMHO, at least as far as Arabic goes. They state that words go from right to left and numbers from left to right. I'd argue that all go from left to right, but numbers are read opposite to how we are used to reading them. For example we would say that this is the year two thousand and three, arabs would say that this is the year three and two thousand...

Posted by: David Kearns on December 25, 2003 7:23 PM | permalink

You mean all "right-to-left", no?

Posted by: Joe Grossberg on December 25, 2003 7:27 PM | permalink

Arabic languages are bidirectional in the sense that the sequence of characters stored in the computer are displayed in a mixture of RTL and LTR segments.

Things are more complicated because for some bidirectional scripts (such as Hebrew) some computers use ‘visual’ data (the character codes are stored left-to-right, which means in the opposite order to how they are written by hand), and sometimes in ‘logical’ order.

Posted by: Damian Cugley on December 28, 2003 8:41 PM | permalink

No more comments! Either someone has violated Godwin's Law, I'm tired of the discussion or, most likely, the ten-week window has closed. You can, however, contact me through email.