Hand-lettered shop sign of a doctor’s surgery illustrating elongation principles of Arabic writing styles. In the context of typography, the latter is of marginal relevance, and this post will only consider the first two techniques. In Arabic texts, handwritten and typographic alike, the remaining space of a line is principally filled using a combination of three techniques: (1) the variation of letterforms (principally elongation and alternative letterforms), (2) changes in the density of black and white, and (3) the configuration of words, including the vertical stacking of letters, reduction of size, and extension of the line into the margins.
the breaking of words at the end of a line, is generally not practised (there are some exceptions, notably the modern Uyghur orthography which adopted word-breaks across lines in typography). Because most Arabic letters connect, hyphenation, i.e. the filling of a line of text to achieve uniform lengths for all lines of a column, uses different concepts to those that are widely known from the Latin script. The basics of Arabic justificationĪrabic justification, i.e. Having established current typographic justification of Arabic, a further post will examine exemplary historical practice from the Middle East with the aim of identifying clues that may contribute towards the advancement of current practice.
#APPLE TEXTEDIT SUPERSCRIPT SOFTWARE#
To understand the current situation, and to consider an informed way ahead, we have to know how we came here.Ī second post will review current software implementations, the available options, and discuss their approaches, qualities, and shortcomings. It will then consider the typographic legacy of justification in a very short history. It begins by setting out some basic – but rarely expressed – observations about the subject which underpin the following discussion. This is the first of a series of posts on Arabic justification.
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