The Traditional Arabic Typecase, Unicode, TeX and METAFONT Yannis Haralambous
To cite this version:
Yannis Haralambous. The Traditional Arabic Typecase, Unicode, TeX and METAFONT. Tugboat, TeX Users Group, 1997, 18 (1), pp.17-29. hal-02101612
HAL Id: hal-02101612 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02101612 Submitted on 18 Apr 2019
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. TUGboat, Volume 18 (1997), No. 1 17
finally able) to impose new standards of simplified Philology typesetting,2 most of the time covering only the fun- damental properties of Arabic script, without any typographical enhancement. Was it the computers, The Traditional Arabic Typecase, Unicode, which have simplified Arabic printed script, or was
TEXand METAFONT it a deeper change in Arabic society and mental- Yannis Haralambous∗ ity? This is hard to say; nevertheless, even today, commercial computer typesetting systems are — a 1 Introduction few isolated exceptions apart — unable to reach the The first Arabic book, a 5 × 11 cm volume titled typographic quality of ’Almat¯˙ab‘ al’am¯arya.In
fig. 2, one can see different samples of printed Arabic