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May 31, 2014 at 1:51 pm in reply to: Applying Diacritical marks for transliteration of Arabic language #68742
Andy Mcgroarty
MemberHi 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!
Andy Mcgroarty
MemberSo i gave your suggestion a try and it looks great!
I also found your article “What Are Your Favorite Word and Character Space Settings for H&Js?” very useful as well.
Thank you so much for all your help!
This website and forum is so helpful, useful and informative!
You guys are awesome!
Andy Mcgroarty
MemberBrilliant David!
I’ll give that a try!
Thanks again, your’e a legend!
May 23, 2014 at 4:20 am in reply to: Applying Diacritical marks for transliteration of Arabic language #68613Andy Mcgroarty
MemberHi 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 21, 2014 at 1:41 pm in reply to: How to create a short cut for 'Adobe World-Ready paragraph composer' #68603Andy Mcgroarty
MemberGenius!
Thank you so much!
May 20, 2014 at 1:51 pm in reply to: Applying Diacritical marks for transliteration of Arabic language #68590Andy Mcgroarty
MemberFor 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, BISans 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, BIR = REGULAR
I = ITALIC
B = BOLD
BI = BOLD ITALICI hope that is of some use to someone.
Best wishes
May 20, 2014 at 1:46 pm in reply to: How to create a short cut for 'Adobe World-Ready paragraph composer' #68589Andy Mcgroarty
MemberSorry David, maybe i didn’t explain myself properly.
I don’t need to find the World-Ready paragraph composer, i want to know/make a keyboard shortcut so i don’t have to access it through ‘Paragraph’
Thank you
May 19, 2014 at 1:30 pm in reply to: How to create a short cut for 'Adobe World-Ready paragraph composer' #68546Andy Mcgroarty
MemberThank you David!
Andy Mcgroarty
MemberSo i posted my question up in the Adobe Indesign forum and i received the following answer that fixed the problem: “The location of the footnotes divider depends on the story direction. (Type>Story and set the story direction).”
Problem solved!
Thanks again for your help!
Andy Mcgroarty
MemberSo i checked the left indent and it seems fine. I then tried deleting all the footnotes and then inserting a new one and it put the separator line on the right hand side.
I’m sure it must be something to do with the world-ready paragraph composing, but i can’t figure out where?
Andy Mcgroarty
MemberPerhaps, i’ll check that out and let you know. Thank you for your help Dwayne.
May 17, 2014 at 1:36 pm in reply to: Applying Diacritical marks for transliteration of Arabic language #68525Andy Mcgroarty
MemberHi 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 15, 2014 at 12:57 pm in reply to: Applying Diacritical marks for transliteration of Arabic language #68474Andy Mcgroarty
MemberHi 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
Andy Mcgroarty
MemberHi there David, i briefly checked these out, but i am on CS6 so it seems to be slightly different, Liquid Layout?
May 15, 2014 at 1:50 am in reply to: Applying Diacritical marks for transliteration of Arabic language #68436Andy Mcgroarty
MemberThank 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
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