Re: ALReq Weekly Meeting, 7 March 2017: Telecon Minutes

On Tue, Mar 07, 2017 at 09:55:31AM -0800, Behnam Esfahbod wrote:
>    ... In the diacritics table Fatha, Damma, are marked as
>    auxiliary, but Fathatan, Dammatan are marked as used.
> 
>    Mostafa: This comes from CLDR. I guess it is because Fatha,
>    Damma, can be removed without affecting text.
>    ... But Fathatan, … are part of some words and can not be
>    removed from a word.

I don’t think such distinctions are helpful. Whether a given vowel mark
is necessary or not depends on the word and the context it is being used
in, so all vowel marks used in ordinary Arabic text (e.g. not in
specialized text like the Quran) should be marked the same. 

>    Behnam: A discussion about spacing is whether increase the
>    space after the period.
>    ... This also comes up around other punctuations.
>    ... These are some of the issues that we want to talk about.
> 
>    Mostafa: Wondering if this topic is too detailed for the scope
>    of our document.
>    ... Specially that these are general typography discussions,
>    not specially about Arabic.

I tend to agree here and also since such typographic choices (at least
in Arabic) seems to vary over time and house styles; some publication
insert spaces around all punctuation marks with more preference to
expend space after period and coma for justification but also shrink all
such spaces when fitting more text in the line is needed (this is seen
more in older publications), and some follow more or less the modern
practices of English typography, and some even invent rules of their own
(like thin spaces before some punctuation and regular spaces after them)
and so on. So I think it going to get too detailed for our document, so
may be a short note that no assumptions should be hard-coded in this
area or something like that would be enough.

Regards,
Khaled

Received on Wednesday, 8 March 2017 01:45:01 UTC