From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Jun 14 2005 - 16:36:22 CDT
Mete Kural wrote:
> Well.. the thing is that this is almost doable just using for instance Word or Internet Explorer and I checked the result on different computers and it looks fine. The only problem is that it fails when it comes to ligatures like lam-alef. So if they did just a little tiny bit more then the whole issue is resolved.
But it isn't a 'tiny bit' of anything, and it isn't a Word or IE issue. It is a complete
change in the way Arabic fonts are made. It is an upgrade to every single Arabic font I
have ever looked at; probably to all Arabic fonts. Word and IE are already colouring
individual glyphs when they correspond to individual characters; they can't colour half a
glyph, but no one expects them to be able to. The only way to colour half a two-character
typeform is to render it using two separate glyphs, which can then be independently
coloured. This is already possible, but it is not how Arabic fonts have been made or are
being made.
The fact that no Arabic font works in this way should tell you something about the level
of demand for bi-coloured 'ligatures' in Arabic text. If the demand had been there, the
font technology would have catered for it.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com Currently reading: Truth and tolerance, by Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger as was An autobiography from the Jesuit underground, by William Weston SJ War (revised edition), by Gwynne Dyer
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jun 14 2005 - 16:38:54 CDT