This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

 

Saad... could you please explain a little about what was going on over and above the subtitles. Thank you... and it was extremely interesting to watch.

Michael

Hello Michael

Do you mean the diacritic vowels? Tasmeem is an Arabic typography and calligraphy publishing plugin software. In that video, Thomas Milo of Decotype who is the key person behind the software was demonstrating how to convert a plain text title into a calligraphic piece!

-Saad

Yes Saad it was very impressive. I posted it in our community site and they were amazed. I hope a simplified version of its text engine become the standard rendering in computers. A simplified version that then could port the text to professional tools such as Tasmeem for graphic enhancements.
If designers could design only different patterns of a string of characters (their body only) then position their individual dots and vowels etc., all by remaining in Unicode encoding logic, the Arabic script can benefit in computer usage as a whole and not just in specialized graphic tools.
This is the area I'm not very clear about Decotype project. I don't know how much of it depends on specially designed font tools to facilitate this concept and how much of it depends on the behaviour of the text engine itself.

Hello Bahnam

>>This is the area I’m not very clear about Decotype project. I don’t know how much of it depends on specially designed font tools to facilitate this concept and how much of it depends on the behaviour of the text engine itself.

Decotype or DT format fonts only need to supply main letter forms and diacretic dots and vowels separately, based on a variety of Tasmeem FL template. The engine in Tasmeem would then set text by default with diacritic placement and inter-word spacing as desired by font designer. A font for Tasmeem can be as simple as a typical OT Arabic font, but it can take advantage of many of layout engine features on the fly.

-Saad

Thank you Saad. My impression at the beginning was that it was typographic but as the piece wore on it became, as you said, very calligraphic. Wonderful to watch, even for the third time!

Michael

From what Karsten Lücke explained me, all the Arabic letters within the OTF files of the Tasmeem typefaces are assigned PUA (Private Use Area) Unicode values, and they are then converted by the Tasmeem engine on the fly as InDesign position them on the page, so the final text remains Unicode-savy and fully searchable.

Should the text be converted to plain text it would remain OK to be set in an ordinary Unicode Arabic face, right?

Yes. The backing store of text remains standard Unicode Arabic. The PUA codepoints are used only internally by the ACE engine during display.

Hi Saad,

This demo was not made by me. I saw this video for the first time today. I am pretty sure that it was made my WinSoft's ME representative. Here's one I prepared, but withdrew after a few days, because of the low quality of the conversion (I find u-toob a bad medium for typographic demo's - you lose too much detail. ):

www.decotype.com/MARA/MaraLayout02.mov.zip

It shows Tasmeem work on what appears highly calligraphic typesetting, but that must be attributed to the Naskh typeface. It doesn't take a lot of imagination that such tools are also very practical for typesetting regular text.

Thomas Milo
DecoType
www.decotype.com

Hi Thomas Milo,

I'm currently using the demo version of InDesign CS4 ME and Tasmeem 4 Demo.

Both the products are really impressive. I would like to convert one of my OT fonts to use them in Tasmeem. Saad Abulhab mentioned "Tasmeem FL templates", where can I find them?

Thanks.

الخط هندسة روحانية ظهرت بآلة جسمانية

Dear Moiz,

Please contact me or Mirjam directly by replacing the www below with msomers or tmilo [at]. Thanks for the interest and looking forward to an interesting project.

Thomas Milo
DecoType
www.decotype.com