  Online nowHapax- Hapax is a guy from Cork, Ireland.
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Saudi Aramco World : Keyboard Calligraphy
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May 2, 12:11pm
1 review
•http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue...
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typesetting arabic script
keyboard calligraphy
In a recent exhibition on Ottoman culture held in Amsterdam's Nieuwe Kerk was an unimpressive-looking little 18th-century book, a printed version of a manuscript produced 150 years earlier. Usually a manuscript is more rare than a printed work, but in this case the cultural and historical importance of the printed book surpassed that of the manuscript from which it derived: This was one of the first books printed in the Middle East in an Arabic typeface. The language was Ottoman Turkish.
The book, titled The History of the West Indies, dates from 1730, comprises 91 pages and four maps and includes illustrations of plants and people. Its author is uncertain, but the name of the printer who produced it is known: He was the Hungarian Ibrahim Müteferrika, the man who started an information revolution in the Muslim world.
Johannes Gutenberg introduced printing with moveable type in Europe in about 1450. By 1500, Gutenberg's innovation had completely transformed the intellectual and economic landscape of Europe--but it had not been adopted in any Middle Eastern country. Why not?
Moveable type had been tried and rejected before, in China in the 11th century and in Korea in the 13th. In both places, the enormous size of the Chinese character set used by both languages meant that it was faster to cut whole-page woodblocks than to cast as many as 40,000 different characters and set them one by one. A similar problem, part technical and part esthetic, blocked the use of moveable type in the Arabic-speaking world--and in the Ottoman Empire, whose language was written in Arabic script.
The technical problem is this: Arabic letters are generally not written separately but joined to each other in groups or entire words, like a script typeface in English. And though the Arabic alphabet has only 28 letters, most letters have four forms, depending on whether they occur at the beginning of the word, in the middle of the word, at the end of the word, or stand alone. Furthermore, each combination of letters is unique, creating a typographic challenge greater than Chinese. Because all letters connect dynamically with the preceding one, and most also with the following one, the number of unique combinations is almost astronomical.
The esthetic problem comes from the dizzying mutability of written Arabic. For example, there are actually three ways the letter ha can be written in the middle of a word, and the calligrapher's choice is influenced not only by the letter immediately preceding the ha, but also by the letters earlier in the word, and even by letters that follow it--yet, in whatever form, it is still in essence the ha in the beginner's textbook. A sequence of letters can run along a baseline the way Roman letters do--though Arabic runs from right to left, of course--or they may start above the baseline and descend in a diagonal if the connections from one letter to the next make that an esthetically pleasing choice.
The result is that the individual letters in a well-written piece of text are in constant motion, like dancers in a polonaise: In the course of the dance, they bow to each other, embrace each other, push each other away, hug each other's necks and fall at each other's feet--and there are some real acrobats among them. . . .
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