Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)

This problem is not limited to Arabic. Variants of the arabic alphabet are used by Persian (including Iranian and Dari dialects), Mazanderani, Qashqai, Luri, Gilaki, Kurdish (excluding Kurds in Turkey), Talysh, Azerbaijani (in Iran), Pamir languages, Pashto, Urdu, Balochi, Sindhi (in Pakistan), Punjabi (in Pakistan), Uzbek (in Afghanistan), Turkmen (in Afghanistan), Saraiki, Hindko, Brahui, languages spoken in Kashmir.

Whole languages are dying out because people are unable to express them properly on computers. Even popular software that dominate these speakers does not care to improve their experience. For example, Urdu has traditionally been written in the Nastaliq form [1], but is usually is rendered everywhere in the Naskh form [2]. There is no way to change this, for example, in Android without basically rooting it and changing the system fonts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nastaliq

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naskh_(script)

Not only writing and printing is hard, so is selection and moving your cursor. Because in most tools, the right and left arrow keys don't mean right and left in Arabic, Persian etc. It's reversed in RTL languages, so right arrow moves the cursor to end direction (left in LTR, right in RTL) and left arrow moves you towards start direction (right in LTR, left in RTL). So in bidirectional text, for example when majority of the text is English and you have a short RTL phrase, you are holding right arrow and then then when you reach the RTL part the cursor suddenly jumps to the start of RTL text, then it goes to left and it SEEMS like you are going backward to the start, not forward. That is until you reach the end of RTL phrase and you teleport to start of next LTR part.

It's 2026 and things like kashida in CSS is not possible. Long way to go to support the Arabic script properly on the web.

And as the article says, since most of the writing is happening on computers, stuff like kashida are going to be forgotten soon.

(2017)

How much of this is still a problem with modern software/font stacks and harfbuzz?

Oh hey, second chance queue, nice. I'd originally searched this up because I was curious about how Arabic worked on early computers.

For a while, Arabizi was wildly popular and universally used on feature phones. When mobiles became smarter, it was used less. Japanese has romaji and Mandarin has pinyin. Arabic's Arabizi would increase literacy rates and solve all these digital problems.

Almost as if the fonts, rendering systems and that all has a vanishingly low percentage of Arabic native-speakers. Why is left as an exercise for the reader.

It's... interesting how the author sees Han Unification as a feature, when it's just a longstanding and politically charged bug. CJK languages are mutually unintelligible, so displaying CJK texts in wrong fonts won't do anything meaningful; it won't make texts in one language readable to speakers of other languages.

Why do people still use this horrible-looking and hard to process alphabet? Why not switching to latin (as some countries did) or at least to reform it so that it's easier to type and to read?