Amiri font v0.015
Another developmental release of Amiri font, marking a major developmental milestone.
Amiri was developed using a novel, and natural, approach of separating dots from base of the glyph and treating them as diacritical marks (which what they really are), this allowed much more flexibility than the more conventional approach of treating the dot and its base as a whole.
In the early developmental stages things were fine, but as the need for more complex tasks surfaced, things were getting exponentially harder and harder and it become clear that OpenType is not ready for this kind of development, and in the last few months I've been hitting the limits of OpenType as spec'd as well as hitting bugs in almost all OpenType implementation, essentially tying my hands from using more advanced (but less tasted) parts of the spec.
So I, regrettably, decided to revert to more conventional and well tried OpenType techniques. As a side effect there is now a one to one mapping between characters and glyphs in its various contextual forms (I'm still avoiding ligatures like plague). This fixes a whole lot of bugs and allows the font to work with more OpenType implementation, on the other hand number of glyphs grew by a factor of 7 and file size got tripled.
With this new turn, the font is ready to move into beta stage, and next release is likely to be the last alpha.
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التعليقات
It was very interesting to
كتبه Majid (لم يتم التحقق) يوم 19 يوليو 2011 حوالي الساعة 21:07It was very interesting to see this font really make use of all what OpenType had to offer, really pushing the envelope. But I guess this makes it more compatible with legacy implementations of handling text (I'm looking at you, FriBidi!). Still, this is a huge step back in terms of technology and even convenience for you as the author. I kinda hoped this were a fork of the original font. Wish I had the time to maintain another version that uses the "correct" approach of handling dots because sooner or later, somebody is going to have to work on those implementation bugs, and Amiri was a great test-font (the only [free] one I could think of, in fact). Good luck with this and with your life.
Off-topic: Do you have any micro-blog we could follow for mini-updates and such? (are you on identi.ca, twitter, Jaiku ..etc?)
It was no a simple decision,
كتبه خالد يوم 19 يوليو 2011 حوالي الساعة 22:20It was no a simple decision, I really enjoyed the dynamic approach. I thought about keeping the font as is and writing some python glue code to convert it a build time to the "static" form, but I dismissed it because it was impractical given the level of complexity and the time available to me. However the dynamic structure still more or less intact though bypassed. The problem is that most bugs involved proprietary systems, HarfBuzz (the most widely used free OpenType implementations) was the least buggy one and had almost all features I needed, if I were to target only free software life would have been much simpler!
You can follow me @KhaledGhetas on twitter (I'm late to micro-blogging; post revolution), I guess it should link to it somewhere here.
Arabic font complexity simplifier
كتبه أحمد صادق (لم يتم التحقق) يوم 12 سبتمبر 2011 حوالي الساعة 13:47Working by hand in such complex typographic script (Arabic) increases the need to have a higher level font development kit. one of the problems will be diacritic collision removal, which cannot be done without enumerating a sufficient number of words as test cases, and the resolution will need manual re-positioning for the cases that have collision. I think it will be done using M-to-M glyph mapping. I do not have enough information about the implementations that have this capability, but it will be needed (for state-of-the-art production quality).
The major problem is, how many mappings open-type can support (and also how many virtual glyphs are supported by open type) to have this feature.
Working at the Volt level, without any higher level tool, will not be a good option when the number of cases increases, like the font I have which has more than 130k m-2-m mappings. I didn't try open-type yet at that scale (there are still some features that I do not know if they are supported in open type, like contextual scaling of glyphs, without forking new glyphs), but I think it will be a great adventure.
خط ممتاز لكن...
كتبه محمد سهلان رشيدي (لم يتم التحقق) يوم 19 سبتمبر 2011 حوالي الساعة 14:24سبحان الله!!! خط ممتاز جد، لكن لا أستطيع أن أكتب كلمة مضبوطة بشكل كامل...
ما الإصدارة التي تستخدمها؟
كتبه خالد يوم 19 سبتمبر 2011 حوالي الساعة 16:02ما الإصدارة التي تستخدمها؟ نزل آخر إصدارة من موقع الخط http://www.amirifont.org
إصلاح بعض الأمور
كتبه Youcef (لم يتم التحقق) يوم 22 سبتمبر 2011 حوالي الساعة 20:45السلام عليكم ورحمة الله تعالى وبركاته
أخي وأستاذي الحبيب خالد حسني أطال الله بقائك وكثرة الله من أمثالك ..
لي ملاحظة هامة رغم أنك أجبت عليها إلا أنها ملحة ويجب أن تصلح وهي :
عندما تكتب كلمة فيها (لام الألف) مثل "الآخرة" فإنك عند تضبط النص في الوورد تجدها هكذا "الـا" أو شيئا يشببها ، ولقد أرسلت لك صورا في المرة السابقة ، وأجبتني بأن الخلل ليس في الخط ولكن في مؤسسة مكروسوفت ..
ولكن أخي خالد ، نحن نستعمل دائما برنامج الوورد يجب أن يكون الخط موافق لهذا البرنامج للعكس على الأقل في هذه الفترة ..
إضافة إلى أخطأ الياء التي تأتي قبل الراء حيث تظهر كشيدة صغيرة (وقد نبهت في رسالة سابقة)..
وأقرب مثال على ذلك هو خط بدر عرابي الذي قارب مقاربة جيدة من الخط الأميري وهو قد تفادى هذا الخطأ..
وفي الأخير يبقى هذا مجرد رأي .. ورأك أنت هو الفصل ..
والسلام عليكم ورحمة الله تعالى وبركاته
كل هذه المشاكل محلولة في
كتبه خالد يوم 22 سبتمبر 2011 حوالي الساعة 21:05كل هذه المشاكل محلولة في النسخة التطويرية التي قد تصدر هذا الأسبوع -إن شاء الله- وأي ملاحظات أخرى مرحب بها.
علِّق