Rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt, an interactive introduction

by SSLy • 1 month ago

19 3 1 month ago

SSLy• 1 month ago

Had to swap stanzas around to fit in the charlimit

littlekey• 1 month ago

Thanks for posting this, a great example of forcing the human element to fit the computer rather than the other way around.

I have my own experience with a similar issue as I work with regular expressions in multiple languages. Getting the cursor to behave while mixing RtL and LtR is a nightmare, and it's always a guess whether the regex engine will evaluate the text correctly. There's also the struggle between forms that look identical but are different unicode points e.g. between Persian and Arabic, as well as the issues with Persian zero-width non-joiners (ZWNJ) which are optional in the language but can look invisible (or nearly so) to the eye.

These are genuinely difficult technical challenges and I understand that there's no quick fix. But I wish there was more of a drive to solve them, rather than the default English-over-everything approach that's so common.

pillmillipedes• 1 month ago

this being so heavily edited by AI significantly sours the otherwise very interesting topic

Rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt, an interactive introduction

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