Non-Latin digital incunabula?

Simon Cozens

I'm looking for early examples of non-Latin digital fonts, both bitmap and vector. I know that some of the IBM CGA graphics cards had Hebrew, Cyrillic and Greek versions of their hardware fonts in international versions, but I don't know if they were the earliest. For vector fonts, I presume there were some non-Latins digitized by IKARUS, but I have no details; obviously Knuth did mathematical Greek in METAFONT, but I'm thinking more about general purpose text usage.

If anyone has more information, please let me know. I am particularly interested in early digital fonts for scripts not based on the baseline-and-rectangle model. (Arabic, Indics, etc.)

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

https://twitter.com/hhpapazian/status/1170410352879628288?s=20

We also made an Arabic.

And in the late '80s, I used my Amiga to make higher-res Armenian bitmap fonts for the launch of Horizon TV (instead of paying Chyron $2500 per size to burn bitmaps onto chips for their video editing system). In the early '90s we switched to outline fonts, using Broadcast Titler and the Commodore A520, a $60 modulator. Around that time I also made Arabic outline fonts, which were typed (backwards, hitting left-arrow after each letter :-) using a hacked keyboard driver; those were used by a tri-lingual yellow-pages, and Persian TV stations. And, of course, wedding videographers.

Simon Cozens said:

I am particularly interested in early digital fonts for scripts not based on the baseline-and-rectangle model.

Concerning Arabic, as with its adaptation to the Linotype (what Thomas Milo calls "Eurabic", I believe) certainly in the bitmap realm but AFAIK also in pre-Unicode outline fonts, the lion's share were made according to what might be called the four-cases-strung-on-a-baseline approach.

John Hudson

Do you have a copy of Fiona's book on Bengali type? It covers the pre-PostScript digital technology pretty well, and of course her team at Linotype worked on a lot of different South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Perso-Arabic scripts.

Simon Cozens

This is her PhD thesis? I shall have a read through it. And I suspect a visit to Reading is in my future.

John Hudson

It began life as her PhD, but was later revised and published. The first, UK edition is out of print, but there was a reprint in India that might still be available: Fiona Ross The Printed Bengali Character and its Evolution.
An irony of early digital font technology is that you are more likely to find analogue design/production artwork than you are to find any accessible digital format. When Gerry, Fiona, and I were sorting the Linotype non-Latin archive in Bad Homburg to determine what would go to Reading, we had to bin racks and racks of tapes.