{"id":1379,"date":"2021-02-12T16:47:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-12T23:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/?p=1379"},"modified":"2021-02-12T16:47:00","modified_gmt":"2021-02-12T23:47:00","slug":"urdu-and-digital-typography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/urdu-and-digital-typography\/","title":{"rendered":"Urdu and Digital Typography"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a lot of complexity that goes into the display of text. Text features like ligatures<\/a>, small caps<\/a>, and font substitution<\/a> surface some of the complexity, even for languages like English whose Latin letters have been part of technology since the very beginning (ASCII encoding<\/a> was standardized in the 1960’s). For languages whose letters and typography aren’t as simple as English things are much harder.<\/p>\n

This article on digitizing the Urdu language<\/a> explains the bigger challenges. It’s fascinating to read about:<\/p>\n

The shape of each letter changes, depending on the letter that comes before and after … In 1980, Mirza Jamil wrote out every combination of Urdu letters that he could think of \u2014 roughly 20,000 by most accounts.<\/i><\/div>\n

The traditional nastaliq script also requires that letters change their height based on their position within a word. There’s a slant to everything, so the text looks like the “wings of flying geese”. You can see the slant in this sample image<\/a> of nastaliq:<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

It’s wonderfully artistic, but a difficult writing system for fonts and technology to properly handle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a lot of complexity that goes into the display of text. Text features like ligatures, small caps, and font substitution surface some of the complexity, even for languages like…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1379"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1391,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1379\/revisions\/1391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}