Re: [css-text] Arabic letters connecting between elements with display: inline

On 24/05/14 3:45 PM, Liam R E Quin wrote:

> If you look in font catalogues you'll find bold and italic variants
> listed for sale - e.g. Adobe Arabic Std, designed by Tim Holloway of
> Tiro Typeworks in Vancouver. The italic slopes \ rather than /,
> expectedly. This may be at least partly because of Western influence;
> for sure the bold italic variants must be.

Most word processing software has Italic and Bold buttons, so people 
click them and expect to see text styled accordingly. If font sets do 
not contain appropriate style and weight variants, software will 
frequently provide mechanically slanted and emboldened versions of 
regular fonts. In the case of a font family like Adobe Arabic, intended 
for use in interactive forms in which style templates may include 
italics and bolds, we had a specific request from the client (Adobe) to 
provide Italic and Bold Italic fonts in order to avoid either failure of 
specified styling or mechanical substitutions.

I see this primarily as a technical issue, arising from software 
behaviour and user expectations. It is has very little to do with what 
is recognisably more sophisticated Arabic typography, or with design 
trends in the Arabic script arising from intentional practise rather 
than accidents of technology.

JH

Received on Tuesday, 27 May 2014 18:17:11 UTC