One of the most advanced and most beautiful Arabic OT Naskh fonts

[Zuhair Albazi]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

Hello Typophiles,
After my first Arabic font " Adobe Naskh ", please check out my second Arabic font, with very special features.

Zuhair Albazi Naskh is the most advanced OpenType Arabic typeface ever created, based on Ottoman manuscript. This unique typeface contains an unmatched range of features known from the Arabic script. It is not merely a font but an ultimate typesetting and design tool for the Arabic script in classic Naskh style, with letters variants and calligraphic styles, specifically developed to take advantage of the extensive functionality for Naskh Arabic typography. The typeface consists of extreme typographic richness and full Unicode support while giving access to the special features of Naskh style. It faithfully captures the historical Naskh as it evolved from practical calligraphy into the best legible Arabic typography ever designed.

This high-end Arabic typeface is particularly well suited for traditional book typography. The font provides fine typographic control by marrying the latest OpenType technology to traditional calligraphic and typographic models. It contains over 3700 Arabic glyphs, including contextual alternates for letters and marks and language-specific forms. The high quality typeface is character based, almost free of ligatures, as only 9 ligatures are included in 3700 Arabic glyphs. Extra care was taken in the design of all outlines. The graceful curves, rounded terminals, and the contrast between thick and thin strokes are consistent and lively throughout the typeface providing all the correct calligraphic shapes for quality Arabic Naskh.

Some Key features of the typeface:

• Control to use different shape alternates for words to achieve the dissimilation of the same letter through variations and to open up new creative possibilities for advertising, front pages, greeting and business cards.

• Control to use different shape alternates for marks also like dammatan, fatahatan, kasratan etc.

• Control to adjust space between words, normal spacing or condensed Naskh spacing.

• Beautiful swashes (elongated letters) for all words.

• Calligraphic Naskh kashida (Tatweel) upto three levels of elongations, so the Kashida distribution and frequence can be precisely controlled to create Arabic calligraphic documents without a calligrapher.

• Accurate marks positioning, horizontally centered, slightly above or below the letters, neither touching the letters nor colliding with adjacent marks.

• Control to adjust the marks placement on letters, normal close marks or distant marks.

• Thousands of kerning pairs for the fine adjustment of letters specially after Raa, Zaa, Waw and before Kaaf.

• Special characters for modern and classic Arabic, such as Qur’anic punctuation and Tajweed marks.

• Proportional and tabular numerals.

• Full Unicode support.

• Suitable for any kind of cultural text, from religious to poetic and literary, to create sophisticated Arabic literary and academic books. Also suitable for large text sizes.

The typeface has two styles Regular and Bold.

Download the Font Brochure in pdf format to view the font and its features in detail.
http://www.mediafire.com/?9nnj64xb1vfaqve

[AzizMostafa]

Well done + Congratulations!
> It is not merely a font but an ultimate typesetting and design tool …

1. Font + Tool or just a font?
2. Does it need CorelDraw?
3. Does it go with Indesgin, Illustartor, Photoshop + M$ Word also?

[Badr Oraby]

Very good, Zuhair.

I did not launch my font - BADRJALAAL -, so you can say " Zuhair Albazi Naskh is the most advanced OpenType Arabic typeface ever created, based on Ottoman manuscript. " :)

I see some notes about diacritic BOS in few cases like " Alef Ghengaryyah " and all diacritics are so close to the letters.

Indeed, the font took a major effort, hoping you all the luck and success.

Badr Oraby

[abattis]

Zuhair, I'm curious if you found OpenType to be limited when you were developing this?

[Zuhair Albazi]

Brother Aziz Mostafa and Badr Oraby thanks for appreciating the font. I hope you may have observed the font brochure and its features. I am also going to add some more very powerful features to the font.

@Aziz Mostafa, It is an OpenType font but with so much options that anyone may say that it works like a tool. It works well in MS Word and InDesign but I have not checked it with other software.

@Badr Oraby, I will wait for your font BadrJalaal. There are two types of marks in my font close and distant. For the small size text I recommend distant marks while for larger text size the close marks look more beautiful.

@abattis, I think till yet I have not found that OpenType is limited but yes I have found font software and desktop publishing software like MS Word and InDesign much limited or having big bugs.

Thanks,

[AzizMostafa]

@ It is an OpenType font but with so much options that anyone may say that it works like a tool.

Anyone may say that it works like a tool?!
https://typography.guru/xmodules/typophile/files/Cerdik%20Jawi.pdf

@ It works well in MS Word and InDesign but I have not checked it with other software.

Not only does the brochure says otherwise, but it also confirms that CorelDraw has been exploited?!

All the best with Flowers

[hrant]

Looks very impressive.

What do you think of DecoType's system?

hhp

[John Hudson]

Muhammad has done a very impressive job, and I was privileged to be able to offer him some technical advice along the way. In addition to the app bugs to which Muhammad refers, there were also challenges getting the font to compile correctly in VOLT due to GPOS table size overruns.

Having a richly featured OpenType naskh font of the kind Muhammad has made also enables one to make some meaningful comparisons between the OpenType and DecoType ACE approaches to the same style. Muhammad's font requirtes 3700 glyphs and a lot of GSUB and GPOS lookups to support only one language (Arabic), and requires the typographer to be knowledgeable and sensitive enough to know how to utilise the many stylistic set features manually to produce various results. DecoType Naskh, on the other hand, uses only 541 glyphs to support all the languages covered by the Unicode Arabic block*, and significant parts of the layout intelligence are handled, with much greater ease and efficiency, by the ACE engine rather than font lookups, while various typographic options are accessible through front-end pre-sets in Tasmeem (alongside further manual control for those who want it).

_____

* DecoType's recent fonts are even more efficient. Their Nastaliq has only 452 glyphs, and I suspect the Ruqah is even smaller.

[Zuhair Albazi]

I am really thankful to John Hudson for liking and appreciating the font. Without his valuable help I would not have succeeded in preparing such a Masterpiece of Arabic Naskh font.
Indeed DecoType ACE (Tasmeem) is a splendid piece of work. The greatest ease of work in Tasmeem is that it shows all the variables for a word before implementation as compared to my OpenType font in which there is no way to do so as it is just a font not a software or software-plugin. But using different combinations of letter alternates to produce various shapes for a word is very easy in my font as there are only 20 stylistic sets and these 20 sets can be learned easily in only few minutes.

My font also has some advantages over DecoType ACE.

(1) DecoType ACE works only in InDesign while my font works in all the applications that support OpenType Arabic fonts.
(2) My font has a compatible bold style also while DecoType ACE has regular style Naskh only.
(3) The Kashida (Tatweel) insertion and removal is not easy in DecoType ACE as every time you have to go to word shaping interface and make your selection when you are inserting the kashida. Even you can not remove the kashida from a word with Backspace key, instead you have to make your selection again from the word shaping interface. Though it looks very easy in a short work of a single page or few pages but it becomes quite time consuming at longer document level.
While in my font the kashida insertion is very easy by the kashida key and it works in all applications and similarly the kashida can be very quickly removed by the backspace key. Even at a document level the kashida can be easily removed by find and remove command.
(4) In DecoType ACE Marks placement is not very good and in some words the marks placement is even very bad as compared to my font that has a very precise placement of marks and it contains the control to use close marks or distant marks.
(5) In Zuhair Albazi Naskh the user can apply any specific letter shape or mark shape to a complete paragraph or even to a complete document with a single click while in DecoType ACE it is not possible.
(6) The DecoType ACE Naskh looks very beautiful at large size but on document level i.e. at small size it does not look so good. At small size the text looks a bit irregular specially when it contains marks. While Zuhair Albazi Naskh Font's beauty and smoothness remains at its peak whether the text is smaller or larger.

Thanks,

[Ryan Maelhorn]

What makes this the most beautiful Arabic font? Although it seems to be quite the workhorse as far as allowing users to change things around, overall the outlines look rather lazy and bland to me.

[AzizMostafa]

@ … my font works in all the applications that support OpenType Arabic fonts.

Including windows notepad?!

@ … in my font as there are only 20 stylistic sets… can be learned easily in only few minutes.

How to apply these 20 stylistic in M$ Word or M$ PowerPoint?

[Si_Daniels]

@AzizMostafa

Why so grumpy?

[John Hudson]

A few, brief comments:

DecoType ACE (Tasmeem)

It is important to distinguish and not equate ACE and Tasmeem, in order to be clear what we're talking about. Tasmeem is a plug-in for InDesign that provides a particular user interface for working with the advanced typographic features of ACE fonts via the ACE layout engine. ACE fonts are OpenType fonts with a custom table made use of by the ACE engine, which provides script-grammatical shaping for Arabic text and enables the kind of advanced typographic controls accessible via an interface like Tasmeem. The interface is not the engine.

Regarding the kashida, this is an interesting topic. While the use of the 'kashida key' described by Muhammad is indeed convenient, it involves manually editing the underlying text string in order to affect a change in the appearance of the text. This isn't quite on the level of the old type 1 'expert set' fonts for Latin ligatures, as the 'tatweel' character in Unicode is generally ignored in text search and sort operations, but it is still philosophically counter to the normal distinction between content and display.

Muhammad is incorrect to suggest that use of manual kashida insertion is not supported by ACE and that use of the Tasmeem word shaping interface is the only way to access elongations. What ACE does not permit is insertion of the kashida in places where is it not permitted by script grammar (which varies, around some general rules, according to script style). If a user keys a tatweel character code in such a position, ACE trashes it from the string; hence Tom's term 'trashida'.

There are actually three ways to work with kashida in Tasmeem: the manual method as described above, the word shaping interface, which is really only suitable for precise control of shorter passages of text or display settings (e.g. the very elegant poetry settings in a recent Brill publication), and the text shaping interface that can be used with stylistic presets and parameter controls to sprinkle the kashida in the text.

It should be noted, by the way, that automatic kashida insertion for text justification basically doesn't really work anywhere: the insertion logic is simplistic, not script-grammatical (and definitely not tailored to specific styles as it should be), and incompatible between different apps and vendors. Visually, it works only with flat styles of type with strictly horizontal baseline connections. Since it is applied after text shaping has occurred, it breaks any OpenType font -- such as Muhammad's, MS Arabic Typesetting or Urdu Typesetting and the Aldhabi font -- that uses cursive attachment positioning to capture top-joining and other vertical relationships of Arabic script.

[hrant]

I pointed out this thread to Thomas Milo, and have received permission to post here a passage from his reply that might be helpful:

"
Regarding kashida insertion Albazi seems to be unaware of the text shaper interface, nor does he realize that we have three levels of kashida:

1. soft kashida, designed for large text corpora. It can be sprinkled into the text only with the TextShaper menu, which contains stylistic presets plus an editor with elaborate configuration parameters. The TextShaper can also be used to wipe or reduce kashidas categorically.
2. hard kashida, designed for interactive, visual placement using the WordShaper interface. Hard kashida cannot be wiped or affected by the textShaper interface.
3. U+0640 Taweel, which can be typed as usual, but will be ignored in "illegal", i.e., grammatically impossible positions. With another font such Tatweels become visible agail. Their codes remain in the text stream. The WordShaper menu contains a Text Normalisation sub-menu, that allows for converting Tatweel into hard kashida.

This architecture is necessary because Tatweel is not a normal character and kashida is not a predictable, fixed elongation. Historically, the script grammar for it varies between styles.
"

hhp

[hrant]

See also:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZipEwMFl3hA

hhp

[Thomas Milo]

Hi Zuhair,

I congratulate you with this accomplishment. It's fantastic to see the stakes raised in the field of Arabic typography by people who acknowledge the real challenges of Arabic script. This is the kind of ambition and professionalism that's really needed. I am happy to have colleagues like you.

I hope to see you typeface in beautiful productions.

Cheers,

t

[abattis]

Hi Zuhair! A simple question: what is the filesize of the Regular and the Bold style font files?

[Zuhair Albazi]

Thomas Milo, thank you for liking the font and for your encouraging comments on my hard work. I have tried to give wide range of features to Arabic users in an opentype font. Your Tasmeem is a marvelous piece of work in Arabic Typography and I hope it will be quite difficult for someone to get ahead of it. The most astonishing thing in your font is its size as very small size give unbelievably huge output.

@ John Hudson and hrant. I am sorry to comment that manual tatweel is not possible in Tasmeem. I was unaware of it as I tested the Tasmeem quite a time ago and at that time I just tried the manual tatweel insertion arbitrarily just in a few words and I think it happened at places where tatweel insertion was not allowed in the software due to script grammar limitation. So I misunderstood it.

Now, after your comments, I once again installed the tasmeem, tested it and found the fact as stated by you. If you could confirm, I have found that manually only a single tatweel can be inserted at the allowed places while word shaping interface allows three levels of tatweel at the same place. Also I have found that at some places the limitation is beyond the script grammar like the word "Hasan" (حسن) as Tasmeem do not allow manual tatweel in it while the script grammar allows it.

@abattis, The font files sizes are
Regular.ttf 778 KB
Bold.ttf 787 KB
Regular.otf 941 KB
Bold.otf 998 KB

Also watch this font in a video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zb2HvrNprM

Thanks,

[John Hudson]

If you could confirm, I have found that manually only a single tatweel can be inserted at the allowed places while word shaping interface allows three levels of tatweel at the same place.

Yes. I'm not sure if this is a feature of Tasmeem or of ACE itself, but multiple entries of the kashida character result in a single (medium length) kashida. I would probably have implemented this differently, equating one kashida character to the narrowest kashida, two to the medium, and three to the long, but this seems to me an equivocal decision: there is no standard for kashida behaviour, and hence people implement what makes sense to them, always with the knowledge that, at some stage, one needs to start swallowing additonal kashida characters. In our Aldhabi font for MS, we can accommodate up to 10 kashida characters as a long, ligated kashida stroke; if a user enters 11, 12, 13 etc. kashida characters the stroke doesn't get any longer and the additional kashida character glyphs are swallowed in the display.

[Zuhair Albazi]

@John Hudson.
Does Kashida swallowing is possible in OpenType font or it is done at software level?

Thanks,

[John Hudson]

I do it during OpenType glyph processing. First I ligate multiple individual kashida glyphs to the longer variant kashida stroke, in descending order of length, longest to shortest. Then, in a separate lookup I ligate the longest kashida stroke plus an additional individual kashida to the longest kashida stroke, which swallows the individual kashida:

kashida.10 kashida -> kashida.10

At present I'm doing this in the 'ccmp' feature, and this works find in MS apps, but kashida ligation done in this way doesn't work in InDesign ME, so I need to see if I can figure out a workaround in another feature.

[Zuhair Albazi]

It means if another font is applied to the same text then the swallowed kashida will re-appear.

In my font I have used a different approach for kashida ligation. Also in my font if the kashida is inserted after three levels then, instead of swallowing, the calligraphic kashida changes to a straight kashida. Similarly if a kashida is inserted at a place where the Arabic Naskh script grammar does not allow kashida then also the straight kashida appear at that place. My font kashida ligation and kashida rules both work 100% in MS Word as well as InDesign.

If you find any shorter way of kashida ligation that work in MS Word as well as in InDesign then please also contribute it with us. Your approach has always helped us a lot.

Thanks,

[John Hudson]

It means if another font is applied to the same text then the swallowed kashida will re-appear.

Of course, because in the case of the kashida Unicode character this is a text entry, so whatever you do at the display stage, this character remains in the backing string.

My font kashida ligation and kashida rules both work 100% in MS Word as well as InDesign.

What feature did you use for your kashida ligation lookups?

[dezcom]

Very well done, Zuhair! This is quite a feat!

[Zuhair Albazi]

I have made tatweel alternates in quite a different way at glyph level so my approach is also different. I used the "calt" feature for this purpose and used different lookups for each level of ligation in ascending order like this

Lookup1

behinitial -> behinitial.one
| tatweel

Lookup2

behinitial.one -> behinitial.two
| tatweel tatweel

Lookup3

behinitial.two -> behinitial.three
| tatweel tatweel tatweel

because there are only three levels of ligation in my font. This way will become a bit longer in your font due to 10 levels of ligation in your font but it works in MS Word as well as in InDesign.

@dezcom, thank you so much for your nice and encouraging words.

Thanks,