میں نے فونٹ میکنگ کے ایک ماہر شخص کو میل کیا تھا اور لگیچرز بیسڈ نستعلیق فونٹ کے متعلق پوچھا تھا۔ ذیل میں میرا سوال اور اُس سوال کا جواب درج ہے۔
چونکہ دلچسپ ہے، اس لیے آپ سب سے شیئر کر رہی ہوں۔
خصوصی طور پر انہوں نے دو مزید اردو نسخ فونٹز کا لنک دیا ہے جو کہ واقعی بہت ایڈوانس ہیں، دوسرا یہ کہ اُن میں مکمل عربی/ فارسی / سندھی / انگریزی / سپورٹ بھی ہے، اور تیسرا یہ کہ انتہائی چھوٹے سائز میں بھی بہترین کام کر رہے ہیں۔ (کرلپ کے کیبورڈ کے تمام الفاظ اس میں موجود ہیں جیسا کہ سن ہجری، شعر کا سائن، مصرع کا سائن، صفحہ نمبر وغیرہ وغیرہ۔
(اس میں ایک فونٹ کا نام "لطیف" ہے جو کہ "شاہ عبدل لطیف بھٹائی (سندھی عارف بزرگ)" کے نام پر رکھا گیا ہے)
لہذا گذارش ہے کہ اِن دو اردو فونٹز کو چیک کریں اور اپنے آراء سے مستفید فرمائیں۔ شکریہ۔
[align=left:b65c8169f4]
Hi Mehwish,
On 6-Oct-05, at 10:46 AM, mehwish ali wrote:
> # Does it effect the speed of Font if we are using a lot of Ligatures??? (Well, roughly their number will go to 4-5 thousand)
> # This will itself increase the size of font to minimum of 10 MB� (Does it will negatively effect the speed?)
> Basic Idea is to have a Naskh style font with a lot of Nastaleeq type ligatures. Therefore, any word, which is not included in ligatures, it will be shown in Naskh.
> �
> �
> Any suggestions???
> �
> Regards.
I don't have any particular suggestion. I'm not�knowledgeable�enough on this very sophisticated matter. Using Nasta'liq is�inherently�complicated. But my first focus would be the text engine of browsers. If MS Office can handle it, there is no reason browsers couldn't unless there is some 'cutting corners' of programing in text engine of browsers. We, and specially you Pakistani and prime users of Nasta'liq should keep bugging developers of browsers to overcome these short comings.
But regarding the concept of font design for Nasta'liq, you should bear in mind that any 'extra' activity that is put to text engine will somewhat slow down the process.
Roman script is the fastest because it doesn't require any extra activity beyond what is given by text encoding.
Ligatures are less�cumbersome�because the text engine can do the job in one sweep. Once it recognized a sequences of text codes for which the font has assigned a ligature, it will do the substitution and there is no going back.
But in contextual substitution which Nafees is based on, text engine should do multiple sweep of text codes because when you type two letters, there may be a particular contextual substitution for that two letters but when you type the third letter, that particular sequence may become invalid and another sequence of letters and contextual substitution may become an issue.
So text engine is constantly doing, and undoing what it has done, as you type. This is a lot of CPU activity.
So I think that the large number of glyphs is not as important as how and how often they impose extra work on CPU. In that regard ligature substitution may be a faster solution. You may have a Roman font with 10.000 glyphs but non of them used in the process (except the essentials). This will not slow down the processing. It only slow down the start-up of the application. Once it has recognized the font, it will be as fast as any other Roman font.
The problem with ligature substitution is that no matter how large you may make your font, your Nasta'liq is still limited to the extend of the imagination of the font maker. This may be already very extensive and satisfactory but to give you an idea about what I'm talking about, let's assume there is a ligature for the sequence of alef-lam-feh-hah-meem.
First of all, you have to type correctly at all time to get that Nasta'liq shape, in contextual substitution on the other hand, if you type wrong, you still get Nasta'liq but a wrong word. In ligature solution you get Naskh.
Now assume that the font maker had thought about that particular sequence of characters but you want to type the same sequence but using ghaf instead of feh. If the font maker didn't think that this was a valid Urdu word, he didn't make a ligature glyph for that particular sequence and you get Naskh and if this is a valid Urdu word or a valid word to you, then you are out of luck.
In contextual substitution, since the glyphs with similar shape are grouped together, and the substitution is written for the group and not for one particular glyph, no matter how differently you type a similar sequence of characters (hah with hamza above instead of hah, alef madda instead of alef, feh with three dots above instead of feh etc...) you still get Nasta'liq.
So ligature solution may be a solution in a limited way for Urdu and not a solution for other languages at all. But in practical terms, it worth trying I think.
I never touched a Nasta'liq because I know how complicated it is. I don't want to discourage you but I think this ligature solution will be as complicated to achieve as it is for contextual substitution. If enough work is not put into it, you will get a lot of Naskh portions in your text mixed with Nasta'liq. This will be very ugly. I'd use a plain Naskh font instead anytime!
Cheers,
Behnam
BTW, have you tried Shahrzad and Lateef of SIL International? They are Naskh based fonts with no ligature at all! Even lam-alef is written by contextually modifying lam and alef individually so you can put any vowel you want between them (this is one of those things that you can't do with ligature solution). They are also very complete for all languages. The font face is not very suitable for Persian but technically they are very advanced. Check them out here:
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=ArabicFonts
[/align:b65c8169f4]