An Arabic Type System for the Digital Age
Unified Arabic™ is a groundbreaking approach to the development of fonts and typography for the Arabic alphabet. It not only radically simplifies the software development required to produce Arabic type, but also promises to accelerate literacy rates in the Arab-speaking world and in other non-Arab areas using the Arabic alphabet, such as Iran, Pakistan,
Kurdistan, to name but a few. Originally patented as the printed form of the Arabic alphabet with separate, unified letter forms, its inventor, Nasri Khattar, evolved his styles to include cursive characters that are unified but also designed to connect, thus closely resembling the Arabic script. Difficulties for software developers include variances in the shape of Arabic characters depending on where the character appears in a word. For example, the shape of a character is different depending on whether it appears at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a word. Additionally, justification of spacing between words or between letters is often accomplished by elongating characters or modifying the connectors, further complicating programming efforts. For example, the Unicode standard assigns codepoint U+0640 as “Arabic Tatweel” to address such elongation. Unified Arabic solves these and other issues by reducing the number of letter-form variations while retaining all characteristics of the Arabic alphabet. The technological advantages inherent in unifying Arabic letter forms, particularly with respect to simplifying software development and expanding the worldwide market, contribute not only to Arabic font and typography development, but also to that of new products and services. Take, for example, the ability of Unified Arabic to improve legibility and readability at six-point and even smaller sizes, which enables significant savings in space and economy, so desirable for digital media such as personal computers, tablets, and mobile phones. As a result, products and services now absent in the Arab-speaking world can be readily brought to market, including e-books, pocket-size paperbacks, comprehensive dictionaries, and even user-friendly maps which today are unavailable due to the need to use larger type sizes. It is also important to address the topic of Arabic literacy rates, which remain low despite improved access to technology. Low literacy rates are not only an obstacle to greater economic development in the Arab world and other non-Arab countries using the Arabic alphabet, but also act as a barrier to the transnational exchange of ideas and culture in the global economy. Of particular relevance to the use of Unified Arabic, a 2005 study by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), based at the University of Pennsylvania, found that the “use of multiple letter forms leads to graphemic difficulty and becomes a significant learning problem and a considerable burden for the Arabic text decoding process, which is vital for the acquisition of basic literacy skills.” The issue of literacy in the Arab-speaking world was at the heart of Nasri Khattar’s invention and design patent for Unified Arabic, which was granted in 1950 by the U.S. A 2001 study, published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in Beirut (UNESCO-Beirut), revealed that levels of illiteracy in 22 Arabic-speaking countries were reduced from 48.7 percent in 1990 to 38.5 percent by 2001. With a continued reduction of the illiteracy rate to 28.0 percent, at least 75 million people out of the region’s estimated population of 280 million would be illiterate. The economic and cultural implications of the use of Unified Arabic are extensive, and its availability in Arab-speaking markets and beyond will generate significant opportunities in business and technology.
