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• • May 14, 2014 at 10:00 am #68432
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    Hi there

    I am transliterating the arabic language for a book and as much as there are many fonts out there with the appropriate characters to do this, there is a real shortage of fonts that i can use in indesign that have the ability to use a bit of style in my typesetting. I need at least regular, bold, italic and bold italic and what fonts do have those options aren’t to my taste.

    So i wondered if i could use my font of choice Garamond Premier Pro and just add the appropriate characters myself? Does anybody know how to do this? To apply the diacritical marks on the letters? These are what i need: ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?

    I have looked at the glyph set of the font and there does seem to be vowels with lines above them already, so they are cool, but i need the letters Dd, Hh, Ss, Tt Zz to have dots underneath them. I think that there are dots underneath in the glyph set, and i have tried to insert them, but they just go before or after the letter.

    Can anyone help?

    Thank you !

  • May 15, 2014 at 1:26 am #68435
    Masood Ahmad

    Participant

    Creating a font for Arabic is not as easy as creating for English. In Arabic the characters take shapes as they combine with characters before and after. There are lot more free fonts available on the net for Arabic. In case you need a font of your choice, I suggest you better consult some Arabic Font Developer.

    some urls:

    https://www.1001freefonts.com/arabic-fonts.php
    https://www.fontspace.com/category/arabic
    https://cooltext.com/fonts-unicode-arabic
    https://www.designyourway.net/drb/34-free-arabic-fonts-available-for-download/
    https://freearabicfonts.com/

  • May 15, 2014 at 1:50 am #68436
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    Thank you Masood

    Perhaps you misread the post. I’m not looking for an arabic font, i’m looking for an english font that i can use to ‘transliterate’ arabic into english characters.

    Thank you for taking the time out to reply and alos for the links, i will definitely check them out.

    Best wishes

  • May 15, 2014 at 9:42 am #68449
    David Goodrich

    Participant

    Here is my real response to this thread, submitted earlier today, now stripped of two hrefs that may have caused the reply to a February thread to be re-dated. Are we not supposed to insert links? Anyway, here goes:

    Are we talking print? If so then coding of the glyphs doesn’t matter so long as they appear correctly on paper. “Correctly” allows a lot of leeway, but even pair kerning is relatively simple and accessible in Postscript Type 1 fonts of the previous century. However, if there is a chance your efforts may become available electronically then you should ensure the encoding is correct.

    Font technology didn’t stand pat with PS Type 1, and Opentype opened a new era of “intelligent,” much more complex fonts. Nice as Adobe’s Garamond Premier Pro is (mine dates from 2005), and although it does offer macron vowels (if that is what you mean by “vowels with lines above them”), it includes neither the dotted letters you need nor the special “Combining Diacritics” Unicode added in the range U+0300–036F. Even when font licenses allow modification, actually adding new diacritcs or letter-diacritic combinations takes professional tools whose cost is steep in both dollars and learning curve: simply preserving the kerning when modifying a nice, modern typeface isn’t trivial, though this is fundamental for maintaining typographic quality.

    Before attempting to de-compile a complex Opentype font you might want to look into Peter Kahrel’s script for entering diacritics in InDesign. I see that he renders underdots with the “Spacing Dot Above”, U+02D9, which may be more common in existing fonts but could mislead electronic searching and indexing; he re-positions this by means of a character style, allowing one to substitute a “Combining Dot Below” (U+0323) borrowed from a more recent font. In an update to his documentation he points to Jongware’s Indyfont, an amazing—and free—InDesign javascript for making single-character fonts from within InDesign. One fly in the ointment is that you lose automatic kerning when you change fonts unless you can live with ID’s “Optical Kerning” (or set up Kahrel’s kerning script); if Indyfont works for you then you might want to buy the Pro version (note that, useful as it is, it doesn’t attempt to replace a true font editor).

    However, a careful Arabic transcription project sounds like lots of dotted characters, and good kerning doesn’t just happen. I’d look seriously at what fonts are out there with the characters you need already built in, particularly in the scholarly world—proper Sanskrit romanization also requires many dotted letters.

    I hope my href links survive, if not a search engine should quickly find Peter Kahrels’s site.

    Good luck
    David

    • May 15, 2014 at 3:52 pm #68477
      David Blatner

      Keymaster

      Hi David, sorry about the hrefs… I think that 2 links should be okay, but sometimes it’s better to stick with one link at at time. Though the true underlying algorithm for why some forum posts get held for moderation is a mystery. Thanks for reposting this!

  • May 15, 2014 at 12:57 pm #68474
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    Hi David

    Thank you so much for taking the time out to give such a detailed reply. I fully appreciate the effort and your well informed insights have contributed a great deal to my understanding of the issue i am facing.

    So yes, it will be for print and we will be looking to do digital editions as well. So your idea to just go with what is out there is probably the wisest option. The only problem as i stated before is that style wise what is out that contains all the characters needed isn’t that great. They seem to revolve around some take on Times New Roman, with what seems like not much thought having gone into that. So as much as they “do the job”, they don’t look that great on the page and can be fairly limited, hence my quest.

    Your link didn’t work for Peter Kahrels’s site, but i found it easy enough. He clearly knows what he is doing, as do you, whereas i am just really at the start of this game. So some of your explanation in the middle there was just over a little my head, but i did get the jist of it. Like you said it would require a bit of a learning curve for me, so i think that will become background research whilst i get on with the job at hand.

    So, a question, if you don’t mind. Can Indyfont be used to produce a version/glyph of a letter with a simple dot underneath it? All i need is to do this to the letters: Dd, Hh, Ss, Tt, Zz, and i guess for the bold, italic, bold italic variations.

    And if so would they be usable in digital/ebooks?

    Just as an aside, i really do not understand how we can have good development in Adobe Arabic typefaces and yet Adobe don’t seem to have one typeface set that contains the necessary characters for Arabic transliteration, it seems ludicrous.

    Thank you so much for your help.

    Best wishes

  • May 15, 2014 at 8:33 pm #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”)?

  • May 17, 2014 at 1:36 pm #68525
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    Hi there

    Thank you for your advice David it has proved invaluable, i got in touch with Peter Kahrel and he has been very helpful and is really nice guy too.

    But it seems that i have offended you in some way with my comments, i’m very sorry for that, it wasn’t my intention to be offensive at all. I really don’t have a problem with any of the above, let alone do i mean to be disrespectful to anybody developing fonts. I was merely thinking out loud, nothing more.

    Thank you again for your help

  • May 20, 2014 at 1:51 pm #68590
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    For those interested i have compiled the following list of fonts that have all the appropriate characters to transliterate the Arabic language:

    Serif Transliteration fonts:

    Gentium Plus: R, I
    Gentium Basic: – no Ain or hamza R, B, I, BI
    Gentium Bk Basic: – no Ain or Hamza R, B, I, BI
    JGaramond: R, I, B
    Cambria: R, I, B, BI
    Times NR: R, I, B, BI
    Caslon: R
    Deja vu: BK, I
    Thryomanes: R, B, I, BI
    Doulos SIL: R
    Charis SIL: R, I, B, BI
    Arabic Typesetting: R
    Junicode: R, I, B, BI
    Chrysanthi: R
    Dialekt Uni: R, I, B
    Hindsight Uni: R
    Cardo: R, I, B
    Jaghbub: R, I, B, BI
    Leeds Uni: R
    KoufrUni: R, B, I, BI
    Palatino (TeXGyrePagella): R, I, B, BI
    Adobe Text: R, I, B, BI
    Linux Libertine: R, I, B, BI
    Free Serif: R, I, B, BI

    Sans Serif transliteration fonts

    Arial: R, I, B, BI
    Arial Uni: R
    Microsoft SS: R
    Myriad: R, I, B, BI
    Sakkal Majalla: R, B
    Segoe UI: R, I, B, BI
    Segoe Semi Light: R, I, B, BI
    Tahoma: R, B,
    Consolas: R, I, B, BI
    Source Sans Pro: R, I, B, BI

    R = REGULAR
    I = ITALIC
    B = BOLD
    BI = BOLD ITALIC

    I hope that is of some use to someone.

    Best wishes

  • May 20, 2014 at 2:55 pm #68592
    David Goodrich

    Participant

    Thank you for providing this list, which wasn’t east to compile. (And no, I wasn’t offended by your broad generalizations earlier.)

    For the sake of completeness, I’ll add the Windows system font Calibri, which is what my Word 2010 applied when I copied the string of characters from your thread<https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1477415&gt; over on Adobe’s InDesign forum:

    ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

    Maintype tells me all 6 members of the Calibri family (as installed with Win7 and copyrighted 2012) contain 2,161 characters In addition to the usual four styles (Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic) the family includes Light and Light Italic. Wikipedia says Calibri replaced Times NR as the default typeface in Word back in 2007<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibri&gt;, which may make it more challenging to use in a cutting-edge design.

    David

  • May 22, 2014 at 12:21 pm #68610
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    First, I must say, I admire your tactful style in your replies. I have just run into a similar problem where I was about to change a text to Academically correct Arabic transliteration in English for the purpose of an Ebook and then realized, I don’t know if I am correct or not, that I could transliterate and then someone using a different font might not be able to read the transliteration in the resulting Ebook. It occurs to me that I may be better off not doing dots and macrons for my purpose, a downloadable Ebook, but staying with my own Ascii transliteration which I used in the DOS program that created the original document. The list you provided of fonts that in theory work, but do not necessarily exist in all faces, is most useful

  • May 23, 2014 at 4:20 am #68613
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    Hi there John

    Thank you for your post as it has prompted me to explore this issue further.

    I guess the issue is whether ereaders are able to render/represent the transliteration characters that you use correctly.

    All of the fonts in the list render the transliteration characters according to the unicode conventions found here: https://www.brill.com/downloads/Simple_Arabic_transliteration.pdf I think that this is probably the safest way to transliterate the arabic language that will cross platforms etc.

    There are quite a few older fonts that do not conform to these conventions like OI-Beyrut (https://www.samuli-schielke.de/oib.htm) etc but i think that these fall under the following description:

    “over the years many academics created all kinds of fonts with special characters for their own private or shared usage. The problem with these fonts is that they are private, they do not follow any agreement with other computers on how these characters are to be displayed. On your own machine, that does not matter, you can type, edit, print with these private fonts in any program, old or new. But if you want to share your documents with others, colleagues, or in particular: with your publisher, the diacritics will disappear or get “transformed” into something else.” (taken from https://org.uib.no/smi/ksv/diacs.html – A very good online resource on transliteration of Arabic and arabic fonts worth checking out)

    So i guess this is what you are trying to avoid, characters transforming into something else in the ebook. But it would seem to me though that the unicode fonts are the safest way forward. I personally believe that it is worth taking the time to do this, the Ascii method is fine, it does the job, but using the unicode characters i feel look much better.

    I have a couple of books that have both arabic script and transliteration and i will be having them converted into ebooks. So i phoned the company who does that for me this morning and asked them about this issue. They hadn’t been presented with it before, so i am going to send them a couple of sample pages and they will let me know if the unicode renders properly or not. I will let you know here what their feedback is.

    Thanks again

    Best wishes

    Andy

  • May 24, 2014 at 10:13 am #68619
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    That is very useful information. Thank you. I note the difference between transliteration and transcription. The Brill chart lists what I know as a tha as a t with a line underneath it. Someone who does not know Arabic, and that particular transliteration, will mispronounce the word. Also, the academic transliteration which takes the article in every case as al- (rather than ar- ash- az- at- ath- adh- also misleads the reader who does not know Arabic. For this reason I have preferred to transcribe; there are different levels to transcription, as with and without elision. Besides the fact that in an Ebook many readers will catastrophically lose letters and not know why, because they are not in the right font, transliterations which use a dot or line underneath may run into a problem in an underlined word. I was about to turn a big document into academic transliteration, and now how have decided to stay with my own old ascii based system.

  • May 31, 2014 at 1:51 pm #68742
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    Hi there guys

    So, i haven’t heard anything back from the ebook conversion people as to whether the arabic transliteration characters display on ereaders yet, but I will keep you posted on that.

    But I did find quite a nice font called Amiri: https://www.amirifont.org

    It seems to be based on Garamond and the Arabic side to be the font is very impressive. I tried it with my transliterated text and it looks pretty good. There seem to be a fair amount of ligatures etc, but I’m not sure about the kerning.

    I wondered if i could tap your expertise and get your assessment of it and maybe you could make some suggestions in regards to justification and so on?

    Thank you so much!

    • May 31, 2014 at 7:17 pm #68744
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      That’s tough to say. So far as kerning–you really only have 3 choices–metric, zero, and optical. My first thought is optical.

      So far as justification–I’d probably make it tight–maybe 75/85/120 or something like that. But don’t forget that justification is the space between words and is separate from kerning.

      But that’s just me.

      To be honest–it’s all about what you think looks good and what someone thinks looks good.

  • June 1, 2014 at 2:05 pm #68749
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    Great! Thank you Dwayne! I’ll give that a try!

  • June 2, 2014 at 12:58 pm #68761
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    Hi there

    For those who are interested i received this reply from the ebook conversion company today:

    “The unicode transliteration characters are not supported by all devices, they work on the iPAD and some of the Amazon devices and also on the Nook although on the Nook the reader would need to adjust the settings to ‘publisher default’, the characters does not seem to work on the Kobo.

    So there are two options for the text, one to embed as the sample provided but this will only work as above, or to image the text, please note images on devices will not resize like embedded text.”

    To which i replied:

    “So, i have a Nook and i have checked out the file on it and it looks pretty good. The Arabic looks a little faint as do some of the Unicode characters. So i am curious if it will look better not embedding the font?

    If the readers that can’t support the Unicode and Arabic characters aren’t that many and the text looks better without being embedded, then that would be an option i would like to explore.

    Would it be possible for you to send me the text not embedded, so that i can see what it looks like without it being embedded.

    Also, i’m curious, did the Arabic script work/display without being embedded, albeit not all all devices?”

    I hope that sharing this may be of use to someone, maybe you John Buterlin?

    Also i have updated my font list that include the necessary characters for Arabic Transliteration, it can be found here: https://www.scribd.com/doc/227676611/Arabic-Transliteration-Fonts

    Best wishes

    Andy

  • September 16, 2016 at 2:23 pm #88423
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    I have just written a small article as to how i went about using Indy Font to create my own set of transliteration characters, you can find it here: https://www.behance.net/gallery/42898371/Custom-Transliteration-Characters

    I have also updated my list of transliteration fonts including many new fonts here: https://www.scribd.com/document/227676611/Arabic-Transliteration-Fonts

    I hope that you may benefit from them, thank you.

    • September 18, 2016 at 3:36 am #88431
      Theunis De Jong

      Member

      Your transliterated Arabic looks really great! Did you go the extra mile of using the correct Unicode code points for all the combined characters? If so, your text will look just fine when viewed on e-platforms as well (… at least on the better ones, those with proper Unicode support – as you already found out).

      Just a tiny footnote ;-) It’s “IndyFont”, without a space.

  • September 18, 2016 at 2:07 pm #88468
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    Thank you Theunis, much appreciated! I am really happy with the result, IndyFont is such an amazing script, thank you so much for creating it!

    To be honest i didn’t use the correct unicode characters, as i wanted to get the letters as exact to the original glyph as possible on the indyfont document, rather than use the another font which has the right unicode characters for the arabic. Is it possible to change a characters unicode in Indyfont after you have set a document up?

    Also, i am curious to see if you have come across any smart ways to compile something like a kerning table for characters you create?

    Thank you.

    ps, i changed the spelling in the article to IndyFont ; )

    • September 19, 2016 at 11:21 am #88492
      Theunis De Jong

      Member

      You can change the Unicode in the *header line* for each character. That is where the script gets the value from. But be warned that if you change your existing font, all its current codes are off! You could bite the bullet and check your entire document again, or (perhaps preferable) you could save the adjusted font under a subtly different name. Then you can keep track of what characters are still to be changed – those in the “old” font only.

      As for kerning: hum hah. Creating a kerning table out of the blue is quite hard to begin with, but aside from the technical issue, me and Marc have no idea of how we should let a user input all those values. For a typical (complete) font, there can be hundreds or even thousands of kerning pairs … Thinking out of the box, I suppose you could use a free tool such as TTX to add kerning, but I have no idea how that would work in practice.

    • September 19, 2016 at 3:00 pm #88496
      Andy Mcgroarty

      Member

      Thank you so much for your help Theunis.

      I will probably just rename the font for future projects, but i am having trouble unlocking the “.notdef” frame from the “Glyphs” master spread. I added my pages so i have the question mark and .notdef in the top left hand corner, but when i Cmd-Shift-Click on the header template page nothing seems to happen. Any help would be much appreciated. : )

  • October 3, 2016 at 4:02 pm #88835
    Olaf Nelson

    Member

    I too do a lot of work with Arabic transliteration, and I too have been fighting the related font issues forever. Going on 2 decades, now that I think about it. And I too have solved some of the issues by using IndyFont (though not with Garamond–my problem was a font that didn’t have small caps of the dot-under letters).
    I like your explanations on the Behance page.
    I would like to see a comparison of the text at the end with and without the improved kerning.
    I also wonder if you’d be willing to share the mini-font of dotted letters you created for Garamond.
    Nice work. And glad to know I’m not the only one fighting these particular battles.
    Olaf

    • October 11, 2016 at 2:10 pm #88982
      Andy Mcgroarty

      Member

      Hi Olaf. My apologies for the delay in responding. Thank you for your kind comments. I am glad to hear that i am not the only one trying to deal with these issues, it gives me great comfort to hear that i am not alone!

      As for the kerning on the characters that i have created, you can’t really see much difference when you use them on their own, but when you correct the kerning manually to the same values as the original letters you can see a difference and they do look great. My main issue was with fonts as a whole not having what it takes when it came to making the text look good on the page because of a lack of good kerning generally, transliteration characters aside. I believe that Robert Slimbachs fonts (Garamond, Garamond Premier Pro Arno, Jenson) are by far the best around for setting longform text, the only problem is that none of them have Lib of Congress transliteration characters.

      If we are doing things strictly by the book then i’m not sure i am allowed to share the mini font with you, but if you have IndyFont then i can send you the Indesign files and you can generate them yourself. I will say that they were created for Garamond Premier Pro, not Garamond Pro. Let me know what you think.

      Thank you for your comments gain, much appreciated!

  • October 12, 2016 at 7:13 am #88987
    Olaf Nelson

    Member

    I would like to see your files just to analyze how you did it and compare with my various experiments. If you want to send them or a dropbox link or something, my email is my first name at chinooktype dot com. Thanks.
    Olaf

    • October 12, 2016 at 8:49 am #88990
      Andy Mcgroarty

      Member

      Cool, no problem Olaf, I’ll put together what I have and send you a link. Best wishes, Andy.

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