DOCSLIB.ORG

Letter from the President

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Letter from the President June 2021 Number 143 Dear Friends, Katie Leavens, and Raoul years of publication, was The last few months have been Martinez. Nancy Noble released in March, and FOC’s full of activity in terms of FOC’s continues as Editor of the Bulletin, own Carl Rohrs is one of the calligraphy events. On May 2, and Carl Rohrs continues as co editors, along with Suzanne we held the 46th Annual General Editor of the Alphabet. You can Cunningham and Sachin Shah. Meeting, via Zoom. The AGM is see the beautiful election slate, Carl gave a lecture about the where we elect the officers and below, calligraphed by Cynthia book and its contents to FOC in Council for the coming year. Cravens. Maria Giudice’s talk April, and you can read about the There were no big surprises, at the AGM about the journey lecture on Page 6. because everyone was willing she has taken through her Several classes have helped fill to serve another year, for which calligraphic and design career time while we are still on various I am grateful. The officers are was surprising, entertaining, stages of stay-at-home. You can yours truly as President; and inspiring. See Page 16. To find articles about them in the Elena Caruthers, Vice President; find out more about Maria, pages of this Bulletin. Dean Robino, Treasurer; Fredi check out her website at Juni, Secretary. Council members https://hotstudio.com/. Stay safe and well, folks. are Martha Boccalini, Cynthia The 25th issue of the Speedball Cheers, Cravens, Darla Engelmann, Textbook, celebrating 105 Evelyn FOC Council Members President Evelyn Eldridge Vice President Elena Caruthers Treasurer Dean Robino Secretary Fredi Juni Council Members Martha Boccalini Cynthia Cravens Darla Engelmann Katie Leavens Raoul Martinez Alphabet Editor Carl Rohrs Letter from the President Bulletin Editor Nancy Noble� Friends of Calligraphy 1 Moved to Abstraction Gold By: Barry Morentz If the arrival of Spring heralds producing sophisticated, elegant through varying weights and rebirth and renewal, so it was letters … but that is not his contrast. Elements were pushed that Mike Gold’s provocative primary concern. together to interact with one workshop Moved to Abstraction In this workshop the goal another, and line spacing was planted potent seeds for the was not to create a traditional eliminated for the sake of discovery and creation of calligraphic composition, but abstraction. The culmination of audacious and unconventional to design a visually arresting these disparate elements resulted calligraphic works. Thirty-four piece out of known letterforms in an asymmetrical composition curious students eagerly that would be extensively generally more dynamic and assembled on April 9 and 11 to modified to establish a mood visually involving than a be guided through relatively and an emotional climate. traditional calligraphic work. unfamiliar corridors of bold and Letters were considered in terms The potential provided by this daring design. of line, shape and form, thus method of design was staggering Mike began his workshop permitting us great latitude to and almost infinite because we well before it actually started bend them however we desired. were urged to create shapes by sending each participant The designs were spontaneous, that would in turn create other an elegantly designed booklet eschewing any pre-conceived shapes that are not simply letters outlining what would be covered notions or planning, but rather by themselves. This opened an in class over two full days. Yes! one of ongoing reaction to the exciting new world of design two FULL days, 7 hours with a one last created mark. If this sounds potential with legibility taking hour lunch break. Any misgivings like chaos, it was not! We were a backseat. Wow! Talk about for sitting in a Zoom class for such steadily reminded to see where liberation! an extended period were quickly our eye was led, and to remember Collage was the focus of the allayed by the swift and steady some fundamental principles of second part of the workshop, tempo of the proceedings and the sound graphic design, such as and it was really an extension ongoing interaction of Mike with rhythm, contrast and movement. of playing with letterforms and each student. Various media including colored shapes. Colored papers were cut pencils, pastels and brushes Many participants initially and/or torn into different sizes could be used at our discretion expressed a certain timidity and forms, and then placed on to enhance or intensify the about the very abstract designs a ground to create a structure overall tone of the piece. to be attempted, declaring it to utilizing the same design be out of their comfort zone. It Some exercises certainly pushed principles as when working with was especially heartening to us in new directions, and Mike’s letterforms. One or two letters, see the gamut of experience in intention was for the work to or a word, or a phrase could then the class, with many seasoned talk to us, even if the language be used atop the collage in an scribes and with a few who had was only fleetingly familiar. We ancillary capacity, and whether never used a calligraphic tool were urged to push the forms to or not it related to the cut papers but were simply intrigued by become unreadable to express made no difference whatsoever. the concept of working with feeling and to create visual jazz This exercise of working with handwriting and imagery. forms and shapes was far more The initial reticence was soon challenging than designing a dispelled by Mike’s encouraging traditional calligraphic text. admonitions that we would be Moved to Abstraction was an Mike Gold Workshop Gold Mike working with line, shape and eye-opening experience for all form, and that pristine, super the students as it freed us from refined letters were quite beside the strictures of conventional the point and far from the goal. design and enabled us to see Indeed, he declared that he such avant-garde compositions is more interested in being a from a fresh perspective. And Picasso-like calligrapher rather Mike Gold, with his superlative than one in the mold of Zapf, teaching, impish smile and although he certainly did express deliciously affable personality, great admiration for Zapf’s awesome lived up to the meaning of his contributions to the calligraphy last name and enriched us all world. And be assured that beyond measure. Mike is eminently capable of June 2021 Darla Englemann’s Collage — Day 2 Additional Images on Next Page 2 Participant Work from Mike Gold’s Workshop Clockwise from Top Left: Dean Robino, Martha Slavin, Vicky Lee, Valerie Franco, Valerie Sopher, Meredith Klein & Maria Fernanda Valecillos, Center. Friends of Calligraphy 3 teaching at Trivial Pursuits and Fort Mason. One day he stopped By: Mary Ann Wight David Winkler at the Berkeley Black Repertory well as bookmaking with many Theater where rehearsals were in workshop teachers, but had the progress for Purlie Victorious by discipline to develop his own Ozzie Davis. He was recruited Copperplate exercises, which to join the cast, and even created he would regularly submit for a blackletter proclamation as a critique to his tai chi teacher and prop for his role. friend, Alice Sink. After nursing his first partner I first met David in Carla Tenret’s through the end of life, David 1985 summer calligraphy class was able to travel. His family at Albany Adult School. Another recounts his trips to Lake Titicaca young mother and I had carved and the depths of Colca Canyon out a brief haven during the short in Peru, Beijing to Hong Kong in biweekly session to socialize China, and a trek to the 18,000 while learning. At the end of ft. level of Mt. Everest. David the class time, David turned began a touching and beautiful to us and said, This is a class, tradition of presenting travel not a visiting room. When I saw journals, containing keepsakes his work, I David Winkler’s home was understood like a jewel box, full of light, how seriously art from his travels to Europe, he took the Peru, Nepal, and China, a practice of music room, exercise room, calligraphy, and a studio which was like and we tried a shrine to calligraphy. David to be less was generous with his treasure distracting under the trees in the Berkeley after that. hills where he hosted visiting friends, family, workshop David was teachers, and jolly FOC holiday born the oldest parties. His large drafting of eleven in table was surrounded by tools, Salt Lake City, inks, and exquisitely executed UT. After passages and broadsides. high school, He modestly described his he joined the collection as largely unfinished, Navy, where of their shared journeys, to but his execution was so perfect he enrolled in Chinese language Carl N. Lester, distinguished that it was never incomplete. study in Monterey. Following public health administrator and David maintained his mastery service in Taiwan, he earned a educator, who became David’s of Chancery cursive by using BA in English at UC Berkeley. He long-time partner and congenial it to record minutes and other worked until retirement at the co-host for many calligraphy routine writing tasks. He Unemployment Insurance Branch events. studied lettering and design as of the California Employment Development David’s life, like his well-curated Department. home, was filled with a wide David was knowledge and expertise which devoted to went beyond music and art, all of the healthy which he shared without reserve. practices of tai Our lives are richer for the patina chi and serious of our contacts with him, his walking. He passions, and his wit.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Arabic Handwriting Synthesis
    © Yousef S. I. Elarian 2014 iii Dedication dهل لوالدي ثم لكل محب To Allah Then, to my parents, and to all who helped, cared, or loved. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks again to my Lord, and to my Parents. Thanks to King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) for granting and supporting this work (Project # GSP-18-112). Thanks to Dr. Sabri Mahmoud and to Dr. Muhammad Al-Mulhem. Deep Personal Thanks to Dr. Zidouri, Dr. Al-Khatib, and the committee members. Thanks to my colleagues: Sameh, Tanvir, Misbahuddin, Irfan, Anas, and to all who helped that this dissertation is completed Thanks from the heart. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................... V TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................... VI LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................... IX LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................ XI LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ..................................................................................... XIV ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ XVII XIX .................................................................................................................... ملخص الرسالة CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • A Collection of Mildly Interesting Facts About the Little Symbols We Communicate With
    Ty p o g raph i c Factettes A collection of mildly interesting facts about the little symbols we communicate with. Helvetica The horizontal bars of a letter are almost always thinner than the vertical bars. Minion The font size is approximately the measurement from the lowest appearance of any letter to the highest. Most of the time. Seventy-two points equals one inch. Fridge256 point Cochin most of 50the point Zaphino time Letters with rounded bottoms don’t sit on the baseline, but slightly below it. Visually, they would appear too high if they rested on the same base as the squared letters. liceAdobe Caslon Bold UNITED KINGDOM UNITED STATES LOLITA LOLITA In Ancient Rome, scribes would abbreviate et (the latin word for and) into one letter. We still use that abbreviation, called the ampersand. The et is still very visible in some italic ampersands. The word ampersand comes from and-per-se-and. Strange. Adobe Garamond Regular Adobe Garamond Italic Trump Mediaval Italic Helvetica Light hat two letters ss w it cam gue e f can rom u . I Yo t h d. as n b ha e rt en ho a s ro n u e n t d it r fo w r s h a u n w ) d r e e m d a s n o r f e y t e t a e r b s , a b s u d t e d e e n m t i a ( n l d o b s o m a y r S e - d t w A i e t h h t t , h d e n a a s d r v e e p n t m a o f e e h m t e a k i i l .
    [Show full text]
  • Using Action-Level Metrics to Report the Performance of Multi-Step Keyboards
    Using Action-Level Metrics to Report the Performance of Multi-Step Keyboards Gulnar Rakhmetulla* Ahmed Sabbir Arif† Steven J. Castellucci‡ Human-Computer Interaction Group Human-Computer Interaction Group Independent Researcher University of California, Merced University of California, Merced Toronto I. Scott MacKenzie§ Caitlyn E. Seim¶ Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Mechanical Engineering York University Stanford University Table 1: Conventional error rate (ER) and action-level unit error rate ABSTRACT (UnitER) for a constructive method (Morse code). This table illustrates Computer users commonly use multi-step text entry methods on the phenomenon of using Morse code to enter “quickly” with one handheld devices and as alternative input methods for accessibility. character error (“l”) in each attempt. ER is 14.28% for each attempt. These methods are also commonly used to enter text in languages One of our proposed action-level metrics, UnitER, gives a deeper with large alphabets or complex writing systems. These methods insight by accounting for the entered input sequence. It yields an error require performing multiple actions simultaneously (chorded) or rate of 7.14% for the first attempt (with two erroneous dashes), and in a specific sequence (constructive) to produce input. However, an improved error rate of 3.57% for the second attempt (with only evaluating these methods is difficult since traditional performance one erroneous dash). The action-level metric shows that learning has metrics were designed explicitly for non-ambiguous, uni-step meth- occurred with a minor improvement in error rate, but this phenomenon ods (e.g., QWERTY). They fail to capture the actual performance of is omitted in the ER metric, which is the same for both attempts.
    [Show full text]
  • VMD134 Calligraphy
    VMD134 Calligraphy Grendl Löfkvist • Instructor CCSF CALLIGRAPHY [VMD134] O COURSE WEBSITE grph151.wordpress.com YAHOO GROUP [email protected] CLASS MEETINGS Ocean Campus, VART Room 142 Mondays, August 21 – October 23, 2017 6:00 p.m. – 8:50 p.m. INSTRUCTOR Grendl Löfkvist [email protected] OFFICE HOURS Mondays, 5:30 p.m. – 5:50 p.m. COURSE REQUIREMENTS COURSE This class is a fun and exciting hands-on introduction to various techniques and styles of DESCRIPTION handlettering and calligraphy. At the end of this course, you should have an appreciation for the written letterform and its history, an understanding of how it relates to type design, and the resources to further pursue the study and practice of scripts and letterforms. CLASS This class meets for 8 class sessions from 6:00 – 8:50 p.m. Class time will include hands- MEETINGS on practice as well as demonstrations, critiques, and discussions. If you need to miss more than one class/homework deadline in a row, please contact me in advance to avoid being dropped from the class. LEARNING Upon completion of this course, students will be able to identify and discuss historical and OUTCOMES contemporary styles of calligraphy, prepare a surface and work environment for calligraphy practice, demonstrate various styles of calligraphy such as Rustic Roman, Uncials, and Copperplate, use an iterative process to create a calligraphic layout, and demonstrate the use of various calligraphic tools and materials. TEXTBOOKS AND REQUIRED COURSE READER AND SYLLABUS assembled by Grendl Löfkvist (bring to class!) READINGS SUPPLEMENTARY (OPTIONAL) READINGS: supplementary handouts and specimen sheets available on the course website, and a bibliography of recommended readings is provided along with the course reader.
    [Show full text]
  • Problems to Be Completed in 90 Minutes
    ACM International Collegiate Contest 2014 East Central Regional PRACTICE Contest Grand Valley State University University of Cincinnati University of Windsor Youngstown State University November 7, 2014 Sponsored by IBM Rules: 1. There are three problems to be completed in 90 minutes. 2. All questions require you to read the test data from standard input and write results to standard output. You cannot use files for input or output. Additional input and output specifications can be found in the General Information Sheet. 3. When displaying results, follow the format in the Sample Output for each problem. Unless other- wise stated, all whitespace in the Sample Output consists of exactly one blank character. 4. The allowed programming languages are C, C++ and Java. 5. All programs will be re-compiled prior to testing with the judges' data. 6. Non-standard libraries cannot be used in your solutions. The Standard Template Library (STL) and C++ string libraries are allowed. The standard Java API is available, except for those packages that are deemed dangerous by contestant officials (e.g., that might generate a security violation). 7. The input to all problems will consist of multiple test cases. 8. Programming style is not considered in this contest. You are free to code in whatever style you prefer. Documentation is not required. 9. All communication with the judges will be handled by the PC2 environment. 10. Judges' decisions are to be considered final. No cheating will be tolerated. 2014 East Central Regional PRACTICE Contest 1 Problem A: The Cost of Moving You've been put in charge of reorganizing the inventory at Amalgamated, Inc.
    [Show full text]
  • Efficient Acquisition and Synthesis in Computerized Handwriting
    UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO GRANDE DO SUL INSTITUTO DE INFORMÁTICA PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM COMPUTAÇÃO DENNIS GIOVANI BALREIRA Efficient acquisition and synthesis in computerized handwriting Thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Computer Science Advisor: Prof. Dr. Marcelo Walter Porto Alegre December 2019 CIP – CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION Balreira, Dennis Giovani Efficient acquisition and synthesis in computerized handwrit- ing / Dennis Giovani Balreira. – Porto Alegre: PPGC da UFRGS, 2019. 110 f.: il. Thesis (Ph.D.) – Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Computação, Porto Alegre, BR– RS, 2019. Advisor: Marcelo Walter. 1. Computer graphics. 2. Image processing. 3. Handwriting synthesis. 4. Handwriting acquisition. 5. Character comparison. I. Walter, Marcelo. II. Título. UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO GRANDE DO SUL Reitor: Prof. Rui Vicente Oppermann Vice-Reitora: Profa. Jane Fraga Tutikian Pró-Reitor de Pós-Graduação: Prof. Celso Giannetti Loureiro Chaves Diretor do Instituto de Informática: Prof. Carla Maria Dal Sasso Freitas Coordenador do PPGC: Prof. Luciana Salete Buriol Bibliotecária-chefe do Instituto de Informática: Beatriz Regina Bastos Haro ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First I would like to dedicate a special thanks to my advisor Professor Marcelo Walter, for supporting and believing in me since the undergraduate course. I have learned so much in this period, mostly due to his guidance, patience and advice. I would like to thank the Postgraduate Program in Computing (PPGC) for the op- portunity and the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) for the financial support. I would like to acknowledge the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and the Institute of Informatics, extending it to the professors and admin staff for all their daily effort to construct this great environment.
    [Show full text]
  • Classifying Arabic Fonts Based on Design Characteristics: PANOSE-A
    Classifying Arabic Fonts Based on Design Characteristics: PANOSE-A Jehan Janbi A Thesis In the Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Computer Science) at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada July 2016 © Jehan Janbi, 2016 Abstract In desktop publishing, fonts are essential components in each document design. With the development of font design software and tools, there are thousands of digital fonts. Increasing the number of available fonts makes selecting an appropriate font, which best serves the objective of a design, not an intuitive issue. Designers can search for a font like any other file types by using general information such as name and file format. But for document design purposes, the design features or visual characteristics of fonts are more meaningful for designers than font file information. Therefore, representing fonts’ design features by searchable and comparable data would facilitate searching and selecting a desirable font. One solution is to represent a font’s design features by a code composed of several digits. This solution has been implemented as a computerized system called PANOSE-1 for Latin script fonts. PANOSE-1 is a system for classifying and matching typefaces based on design features. It is composed of 10 digits, where each digit represents a specific design feature. It is used within several font management tools as an option for ordering and searching fonts based on their design features. It is also used in font replacement processes when an application or an operating system detects a missing font in an immigrant document or website.
    [Show full text]
  • V·Index of Linguistic Items
    Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-82348-7 - The Cambridge Encyclopedia of: The English Language: Second Edition David Crystal Index More information V · INDEX OF LINGUISTIC ITEMS A back of 311 dice 201 -ex 201 heightist 177 /k-/, /-k / (sound bad 199 did 347 exist 231 hello 393 symbolism) 251 a indefinite article 222–3, barely 218 different(ly) from/to/than extra- 128 helpmate 139 Kate 153 330 bastard 251 194, 311, 451 herb 260 Kellogg 268 short vs long 307, 325, be 212, 221, 225, 231, 347 dis- 128 F heterosexist 177 Kinki 114 351 inflected 21, 343 div/divent 326 his (= its)65 knave 63 verb particle 347 regional variation 322 do 45, 65, 70, 212, 219, -/f/ (sound symbolism) history 136 a- 128, 315 be- 128 228, 326, 347, 418 251 -hood 198, 208 L -a noun singular 201 be about to 224 does 204–5, 326 F/f 259–60, 268 hopefully 194, 229 noun plural 201 been 347 -dom 198, 208 far 199 house 207 /l/ clear 245, 337, 343, -a- (linking vowel) 129 be going to 224 don’t 219 farther/farthest 199 how (exclamatory) 219 345 A/a 259, 268 best 199 dos 326 -fashion 211 hurting 314 dark 245, 345, 354 AA (abbreviations) 121 be to 224 do so 228 fattyist 177 hyper- 128, 429 sound symbolism 251 -able 198, 211 better 199 dot 429 fi 347 vocalized 327 ableism 177 between you and I 194, 203 dunno 275 -fix 455 I voiceless 335 -acea 198 bi- 128 fore- 128 L/l 261 -ae (plural) 201 bio- 129 E for ti 338 I (pronoun) 347 La- 150 after (aspectual) 338, 343 bloody 98, 173, 352 frae 329 vs me 203 larf 275 -age 198, 208 -body 210 e magic/silent 42, 200, -friendly 133 -i (plural)
    [Show full text]
  • Adaptifont: Increasing Individuals' Reading Speed with a Generative
    AdaptiFont: Increasing Individuals' Reading Speed with a Generative Font Model and Bayesian Optimization Florian Kadnera;b Yannik Kellera;b Constantin A. Rothkopfa;b aCentre for Cognitive Science, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany bInstitute of Psychology, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany Abstract Digital text has become one of the primary ways of exchanging knowledge, but text needs to be rendered to a screen to be read. We present AdaptiFont, a human-in-the-loop system that is aimed at interactively increasing readability of text displayed on a monitor. To this end, we first learn a generative font space with non-negative matrix factorization from a set of classic fonts. In this space we generate new true-type-fonts through active learning, render texts with the new font, and measure individual users' reading speed. Bayesian optimization sequentially generates new fonts on the fly to progressively increase individuals' reading speed. The results of a user study show that this adaptive font generation system finds regions in the font space corresponding to high reading speeds, that these fonts significantly increase participants' reading speed, and that the found fonts are significantly different across individual readers. a) Font generation b) Detection task instruction c1) Reading & detection task c2) Question answering d) Bayesian Optimization Lorem Ipsum Dimension 3 Please detect words The quick brown What color was from the category: fox jumps over the the fox? Animals lazy dog. a) red b) blue c) yellow d) green e) brown f) purple 0 Dimension 1 Dimension 2 Figure 1: Schematic of the closed-loop algorithm for generating and optimizing fonts to increase individuals' reading speed.
    [Show full text]
  • Fonts & Encodings
    Fonts & Encodings Yannis Haralambous To cite this version: Yannis Haralambous. Fonts & Encodings. O’Reilly, 2007, 978-0-596-10242-5. hal-02112942 HAL Id: hal-02112942 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02112942 Submitted on 27 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. ,title.25934 Page iii Friday, September 7, 2007 10:44 AM Fonts & Encodings Yannis Haralambous Translated by P. Scott Horne Beijing • Cambridge • Farnham • Köln • Paris • Sebastopol • Taipei • Tokyo ,copyright.24847 Page iv Friday, September 7, 2007 10:32 AM Fonts & Encodings by Yannis Haralambous Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (safari.oreilly.com). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: (800) 998-9938 or [email protected]. Printing History: September 2007: First Edition. Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O’Reilly logo are registered trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Fonts & Encodings, the image of an axis deer, and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc.
    [Show full text]
  • LUCIDAH Ligative and Unligative Characters in a Dataset for Arabic Handwriting
    (IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, Vol. 10, No. 8, 2019 LUCIDAH Ligative and Unligative Characters in a Dataset for Arabic Handwriting 1 Yousef Elarian Abdelmalek Zidouri3 Teaching and Learning Coaching Electrical Engineering Department ® Interserve King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals Madīnah, Saudi Arabia Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia 2 Irfan Ahmad Wasfi G. Al-Khatib4 Information and Computer Science Department Information and Computer Science Department King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia Abstract—Arabic script is inherently cursive, even when either written in the normal horizontal connection form or as a machine-printed. When connected to other characters, some ligature, depending on the writer’s choice. Arabic characters may be optionally written in compact aesthetic forms known as ligatures. It is useful to distinguish ligatures Many character sequences are not ligative (or “unligative”, from ordinary characters for several applications, especially as we refer to them); i.e., they do not have optional ligature ,family ”ـ٬“ or ”٫“) automatic text recognition. Datasets that do not annotate these forms. One particular family of ligatures ,and Madda (“~”) combinations (”ء“) ligatures may confuse the recognition system training. Some with different Hamza is considered (”ـ٪“ ,”٩“ ,”ـ٦“ ,”٥“ ,”ـ٨“ ,”٧“ ,popular datasets manually annotate ligatures, but no dataset namely (prior to this work) took ligatures into consideration from the obligatory, i.e., its constituent LAM and ALEF characters design phase. In this paper, a detailed study of Arabic ligatures cannot be connected in the common horizontal form. Table I and a design for a dataset that considers the representation of shows different connections of a ligative, an unligative, and an ligative and unligative characters are presented.
    [Show full text]
  • It's All About Languages! :: Lingvo.Info
    It's all about languages! Information about 28 languages in Europe Bulgarian Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Finnish French German Greek Hungarian Irish Italian Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Polish Portuguese Romani Romanian Russian Slovak Slovene Spanish Swedish Turkish © 2019 kids.lingvo.info This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. Bulgarian Български език Number of native speakers about 7 million in Bulgaria, 10 to 12 million speakers worldwide Official language in Minority language in Language of diaspora Bulgaria, Mount Athos (Greece), Romania (Banat variant), Australia, Albania, Canada, US, EU Serbia, Slovakia, Ukraine, France, Greece, Germany, Spain, Hungary Italy, Turkey, UK, Moldova, among emigrant communities worldwide Alphabet Grammatical cases Cyrillic, 30 letters 0 Language code Linguistic typology bg, bul inflectional , pro-drop , SVO Language family Number of dialects Indo-European; Balto-Slavic; Slavic; South Slavic about 70 dialects, divided into 2 major groups (Eastern and Western) Longest word Curious word or sentence Непротивоконституционствувателствувайте​ За миг бях в чужд, скърцащ плюшен фотьойл. Do not act against the constitution! (plural) For a moment I was in a strange, squeaky plush armchair. 39 letters (the word is not included in official dictionaries) 33-letter pangram - a sentence using
    [Show full text]