[Multilingual Monday] Arabic typesetting
A fairly quick one today -- one of the blogs I've been following has been 29LT, which discusses Arabic typesetting. Arabic seems to have had quite a number of growing pains when it comes to adapting to technology in order to create a fairly accurate version of the Arabic script via various machines, as seen in this particular article, where various solutions on direction, conjunction, form changes, and the like are discussed, and the old question of ability vs. tradition seems to come up quite often.
My first glimpse in attempting to type Arabic was, believe it or not, this computer here, where a "simplified Arabic script" was used, consolidating forms that were "similar enough" into one glyph that would get typed on the keyboard. This layout and system has been seen on mechanical typewriters as well, and Arabic certainly got off a bit luckier here than, say, Amharic, which had to create unseen forms in order to shoehorn the language into available technology.
My first glimpse in attempting to type Arabic was, believe it or not, this computer here, where a "simplified Arabic script" was used, consolidating forms that were "similar enough" into one glyph that would get typed on the keyboard. This layout and system has been seen on mechanical typewriters as well, and Arabic certainly got off a bit luckier here than, say, Amharic, which had to create unseen forms in order to shoehorn the language into available technology.