diverging from conventions for Arabic joining

Peter Constable
Peter Constable Posts: 278
in Type Design Technique & Theory
This is a question for Arabic script experts:

How strong or intrinsic are the conventions for which letters of Arabic script join on the left or the right? Is it conceivable that a designer could create a design setting some Arabic text in which some letters don't follow the normal conventions — e.g., having a beh not join on the left or on the right, or having an alef or dal join on the left?

Is it plausible that, given enough time, conventions could evolve so that common practice for joining (perhaps only in non-liturgical / Quranic text) is not what it is today?
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  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,712
    edited July 11
    There are optional ligations, beyond standard joining behaviour, that occur in several styles of Arabic script. Some of these join together letter groups that would be separated under standard joining rules. For example, the ʾalif +ʿayn and dāl + ʾalif + lām sequences in this Ruqāʿ example (not to be confused with the Ruqʿah style that is the basis of much modern handwriting).

    I’m not aware of any significant move towards changing or abandoning standard joining behaviours. There have been several proposals and models of disconnected Arabic script in the modern period, but none of them have caught on beyond the work of their inventors.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,712
    The Aldhabi font we made for Microsoft includes ʾalif + lām ligation. This kind of optional ligation, of course, has to be applied on top of the standard behaviour implemented in the joining features, using contextual substitutions. In Aldhabi, this is activated by the calt feature, as I recall, so users have an option to disable it.






  • Paul Hanslow
    Paul Hanslow Posts: 194
    Very insightful, John.

    Speaking into the void here, but I did wonder if the limitations of hot metal type resulted in some 'subpar' non-joining Arabic typefaces being designed/crafted. I have no information on this, other than my question of whether limitations on metal-type production negatively impacted Arabic's joining behaviour. 
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,712
    edited 2:47PM
    The majority of Arabic typography has involved some simplification of the script, and this precedes hot metal technologies. Most European reductions of the script to type involved a crude understanding of the ways in which letters in the various written styles combine, and reduced the number of variant forms needed to make those combinations. More complex graphical combinations, if supported at all, tended to be cast as ligatures, in order to fit within the typesetting model of sequential rectangular units. These inevitably fail to capture the flow of text as it would be written in the script, because they are inserted within the reduced set of joining forms.
    The biggest impact of hot metal typesetting was the introduction of ‘Simplified Arabic’, a Linotype typeface later known as Yakout, which was introduced for newspaper setting in Lebanon in the late 1950s. This design reuses the same form for many initial and medial letters, which allowed fitting to the Linotype 90-channel matrix case, and avoided the need for a supplementary or extended case. This speeded up composition. Similar techniques were used to fit Arabic to typewriters.
    Standard joining behaviour, in terms of analysis of which letters join on both sides vs on the right side only, is maintained in all this, though. What is lacking is the flexibility of the script in terms of how the letters connect. As a parallel, consider Latin cursive writing styles, in nearly all of which the o connects to following letters from the top. Now think of the various script style fonts in which all letters connect from and to the same location. That is the kind of simplification applied to Arabic, only of course applied to very many letters with various kinds of combining behaviours.
  • Bahman Eslami
    Bahman Eslami Posts: 74
    There are some situations in Arabic script where non-joining letters also connect to the next letter. This happens especially when the writer wants to create a special letter fusion, which might be equivalent to a ligature in Latin. Letters that don't connect to the next letter are called «وارد» (meaning "to enter" in Persian), because most non-connecting letters derive their shapes from these four. In certain display contexts, «وارد» letters can occasionally connect to the following letter, but their shape changes far less than that of connecting letters, since greater alteration would make them too distinctive.

    For connecting letters, there is no option to leave them unconnected. If they don't connect, their shape changes so much that it completely breaks the word form; a feature that varies far more from word to word in Arabic script than in Latin.

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