Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Why do people still use this horrible-looking and hard to process alphabet? Why not switching to latin (as some countries did) or at least to reform it so that it's easier to type and to read?by Panzerschrek
- Why should all writing be forced into 1 way of doing things? That just sounds disrespectful of other peoples' culture.by RetroTechie
- What’s the point of insulting a script as “horrible looking”. What a silly comment, please grow up.by ah27182
- Because pretty much no language besides Latin actually maps nicely to the Latin script. Pretty much all languages use digraphs, diacritic symbols or completely new letters in the Latin script (even English, œ and æ, for some time at least).by cenamus
- It's... interesting how the author sees Han Unification as a feature, when it's just a longstanding and politically charged bug. CJK languages are mutually unintelligible, so displaying CJK texts in wrong fonts won't do anything meaningful; it won't make texts in one language readable to speakers of other languages.by numpad0
- Indeed displaying CJK texts in wrong fonts won't do anything to change the meaning and people who can read it in one font can read it in any font. They might complain that it looks ugly because that one stroke should be slightly longer and have a different angle, but those are ultimately aesthetic preferences that don't affect readability.
Even before Unicode, it was established practice that documents mixing Chinese and Japanese would use the same encoding for both and roughly nobody would bother to pick an ugly font for the foreign-language text to make it look appropriately different.
Unicode rightly decided that the fine details of appearance are left to fonts. Otherwise you'd also need e.g. a bunch of extra codepoints so that early-20th-century handwritten letters in German can have their look accurately preserved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin
by yorwba - Almost as if the fonts, rendering systems and that all has a vanishingly low percentage of Arabic native-speakers. Why is left as an exercise for the reader.by jojobas
- Oh hey, second chance queue, nice. I'd originally searched this up because I was curious about how Arabic worked on early computers.by a_t48
- It's 2026 and things like kashida in CSS is not possible. Long way to go to support the Arabic script properly on the web.
And as the article says, since most of the writing is happening on computers, stuff like kashida are going to be forgotten soon.
by mohsen1 - Hmm. by kashida do you mean something like 'ایـــــــــــــن'?
I don't think you mean this, because I don't know how would you do it in CSS. Looks more like a problem to be solved with different types of character than styling.
You may want to explain more.
by linmer - (2017)
How much of this is still a problem with modern software/font stacks and harfbuzz?
by harshreality - The fact that the article was able to show correct version in regular text is pretty good indicator that if done correctly those are more or less solved problems. I don't disagree that there are probably plenty of times when those mistakes are repeated and solutions not used widely enough (more often for Arabic scripts than other languages), but even for 2017 it feels more like anecdotal examples of what can go wrong ignoring existing technical details. But those mistakes largely come down to having someone who cares and understands the language and technology not for the lack of solutions. There are probably plenty of interesting edge cases that might not be handled perfectly even though solutions for basic cases exist, but article doesn't come even close to discussing those technical details especially if it's only conclusion is "computers introduced more problems, notably because of Unicode".
> The inflexibility persisted and has arguably only become more aggravated in the 20th century
What about 21th century? Digital printing can overlap characters just fine. And modern fonts support context sensitive ligatures and glyph substitutions.
Second/third example those seemed to be caused by more by someone who doesn't understand the language copy pasting stuff.
PDF -> that's just PDF being bad. Text and text search in PDFs tends to mes up even or English.
> with unicode number U+0623, but one can also type أ, which is an alif and a high hamza, represented by unicode numbers U+0627 and U+0654.
That's what Unicode normalization and locale settings are for. Same thing applies to large fraction of latin based scripts other than English, anything which has letters with diacritic marks.
> for كثيره and كثيرة will in most cases yield different results
Similar thing in almost any non English language for example cafe and café or ABC and ⒶⒷⒸ. Although at least some systems handle it reasonably. Not sure how much it is heuristics based on large data (hard to scale across software), and how much it's good application of Unicode character decomposition/normal form tables. Which Arabic letters lack appropriate Unicode decomposition (and other) tables and what are the best practices of unicode normalization/decomposition/locale handling for search (applicable for all languages) are more interesting and actionable topics.
> Not even the simple idea of CJK has been implemented.
Many users of CJK language would argue that CJK unification was a mistake. If different languages prefer different forms of the glyph, they should better be separate characters. Having separate Chinese and Japanese fonts because CJK unified too much just introduces additional points of failure.
by Karliss - It still is a problem in general, that's why fonts now have webassembly in it.
This repository has a good outlook: https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz-wasm-examples
by ValdikSS - For a while, Arabizi was wildly popular and universally used on feature phones. When mobiles became smarter, it was used less. Japanese has romaji and Mandarin has pinyin. Arabic's Arabizi would increase literacy rates and solve all these digital problems.by pseingatl
- Many Arabic-speaking countries already have very high literacy rates. Meanwhile Somali is a related language officially written in the Latin alphabet, but Somalia has a literacy rate around 50%: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-ra...
So adopting Arabizi without increasing access to education can be expected to do roughly nothing for literacy, whereas with a good education system, people can learn to read and write in Arabic script just fine.
by yorwba - Not only writing and printing is hard, so is selection and moving your cursor. Because in most tools, the right and left arrow keys don't mean right and left in Arabic, Persian etc. It's reversed in RTL languages, so right arrow moves the cursor to end direction (left in LTR, right in RTL) and left arrow moves you towards start direction (right in LTR, left in RTL). So in bidirectional text, for example when majority of the text is English and you have a short RTL phrase, you are holding right arrow and then then when you reach the RTL part the cursor suddenly jumps to the start of RTL text, then it goes to left and it SEEMS like you are going backward to the start, not forward. That is until you reach the end of RTL phrase and you teleport to start of next LTR part.by linmer
- This problem is not limited to Arabic. Variants of the arabic alphabet are used by Persian (including Iranian and Dari dialects), Mazanderani, Qashqai, Luri, Gilaki, Kurdish (excluding Kurds in Turkey), Talysh, Azerbaijani (in Iran), Pamir languages, Pashto, Urdu, Balochi, Sindhi (in Pakistan), Punjabi (in Pakistan), Uzbek (in Afghanistan), Turkmen (in Afghanistan), Saraiki, Hindko, Brahui, languages spoken in Kashmir.
Whole languages are dying out because people are unable to express them properly on computers. Even popular software that dominate these speakers does not care to improve their experience. For example, Urdu has traditionally been written in the Nastaliq form [1], but is usually is rendered everywhere in the Naskh form [2]. There is no way to change this, for example, in Android without basically rooting it and changing the system fonts.
- I don't know why people look down their noses at Arabizi
- This seems an esoteric problem for the outsider.
But consider how cursive is dying out in (at least American) English, and how many centuries of writing will become unintelligible to the casual reader as a result.
All of these important cultural artifacts require maintenance.
by smitty1e - I feel like I've never gotten a compelling explanation for why Nastaliq is hard/unavailable. I'm not an expert on abjads, but it doesn't look harder to render then Naskh (and it self-evidently is possible since the fonts exist). Does anyone here know why they make it difficult? Urdu is much less obscure than, say, Sharada or other languages with Unicode support. I think Punjabi is also often written in Nastaliq when it's not in Gurmukhi or Roman.by Conscat
- > There is no way to change this, for example, in Android without basically rooting it and changing the system fonts.
I am really surprised Android won't let the user select their own system font. This is a huge accessibility problem, especially for dyslexics.