Reply To: Applying Diacritical marks for transliteration of Arabic language

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#68478
David Goodrich
Participant

“Ludicrous” is in the eye of the beholder. Do you really believe the betterment of mankind requires Adobe or anybody else to revise a huge family of fonts issued years ago to include special characters you think you need for transliterating Arabic? (Bear in mind that there is serious debate over whether Opentype is adequate for transcribing Arabic.) In the real world such things don’t just happen, and when they do it is generally thanks to deep pockets (system fonts) or really dedicated special interest (e.g., Summer Institute of Linguistics, God bless’em, though their god might not be mine). If the style of existing fonts isn’t yours, you’re free to come up with your own typeface family — but do you have any idea how many kerning pairs are contained in Adobe’s Garamond Premier Pro regular, or why T-underdot/a-macron might not fit in the same class with T/a? Those who care about type may have limited affection for Times NR, but they will still be offended by the statement that “not much thought” went into making it: how many fonts do you know where you can type an H followed by a combining underdot and get U+1E24 (“latin capital letter h with dot below”)?

This article was last modified on May 15, 2014

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