Script intro:
In the course of the evolution of the Arabic script from the Nabataean
script (from Aramaic), the forms of many Arabic letters became identical. To
differentiate between them, dots were added as integral part of the letters.
For example U+0628 ARABIC LETTER BEH and U+064A ARABIC LETTER YEH are, in
their connected glyphs (ie in with another letter written to their right)
identical except for the dots: one dot under ARABIC LETTER BEH, and two
(horizontal) dots under ARABIC LETTER YEH.
Web font relevance:
The Tahoma font, which Internet Explorer often uses as a default when the
encoding is not font-specific (for example Hebrew or Arabic where the
language pack has not yet been installed), is very badly designed for Arabic
on the Web. The reason: any underline hides the distinguishing points. That
is, if you have a hyperlink in Arabic and the font is Tahoma, then U+0628
and U+064A look the same, and you have to guess which is which according to
the context. This is the same sort of early taHreef ("incorrect spelling")
which the dots were meant to eliminate in the first place!
To those who publish Arabic content on the Web: avoid using Arabic Tahoma in
Web pages as much as you can. The Simplified Arabic font is the best and
clearest on the eye. Times New Roman for Arabic is less clear but still
doesn't have the problem of underlining over dots.
Do your tests on Ayna.Com (http://www.ayna.com), which has CP1256,
ISO-8859-6, UTF-8 and GIF versions, to see the ramifications of using
different Arabic fonts. I first encountered this problem on the UTF-8
version of Ayna, and had a very hard time reading the text because of the
lack of distinguishing dots. CP1256 and ISO-8859-6 Arabic web pages usually
prompt the user to install the Arabic language pack, meaning the Simplified
Arabic font, so they are less of a problem. But be sure to map Arabic to the
Simplified Arabic font, or Times New Roman if the former in lacking.
Shlomi Tal
http://www.pcphobia.co.il/hebcomp/
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Apr 17 2002 - 05:45:58 EDT