Arabic Typography: An Interactive History.

Vita Nouva has a remarkable interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt: Once upon a time, a frontend ticket landed on my queue which was not properly mine, but the only other Arabic reader on the team was on leave. It went roughly as follows; a block of mixed-content Arabic prose on the customer-facing dashboard was rendering with a ragged left edge (the rag falls on the left in Arabic, since the lines set out from the right margin; the ticket said “ragged right”) when the design team had explicitly specified justified text. Attached were three screenshots from three browsers and a polite note from the product manager observing that the Latin-script version of the same block looked, I quote, “fine.” The same six months I had closed three other tickets against the same product, each of which had presented to its filer as the only bug. A customer’s name had appeared with its letters unjoined on a printed agreement, the way a…