Re: What characters have baseline?

From: Philipp Reichmuth (uzsv2k@uni-bonn.de)
Date: Thu Apr 18 2002 - 02:21:11 EDT


>> BTW, I heard strange things about baselines, such as that the baseline for
>> Indic fonts should be near the top of letters, while for good Arabic
>> typography it should be oblique. Can someone confirm these notions?

VI> The baseline of Arabic (in general meaning) typographical fonts
VI> (Nasx) is horizontal and must be aligned to the
VI> Latin-Cyrillic-Greek baseline. Beside that handwritten scripts
VI> like Nastaliq or Tahriri have an oblique baseline for each word.

One should note that handwritten scripts like Nasta`liq are
handwritten only because there exist little adequate typesetting
solutions. These scripts are used in print, mainly through lithography
(there were handwritten and lihtographed newspapers until recently,
esp. in Pakistan; I don't know whether they still exist, though), and
if there were sufficient means to typeset them on the computer, people
would use them in print quite extensively. Even now, there's a good
number of Nasta`liq fonts under development where the angled baseline
is more or less hacked together through OpenType offset operations.

VI> The angle of that secondary baseline is 27.5º, like this:

I don't think it's fixed 27.5° in handwritten script, it varies quite
considerably, partly depending on how much text has to fit in the line
in calligraphy. In ordinary handwriting, the angle easily reaches 45°
or more.

  Philipp mailto:uzsv2k@uni-bonn.de
___________________
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