Making the rounds last week was this magnificent article on the complications of Arabic typesetting, An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt. The author, Saleh, promises: The reply took and the closure of the ticket took half an hour or so. The reasons behind it took five hundred years to pile up, and they involve a twice-mutilated vizier, a Qurʾān that vanished for four centuries, a Beirut newspaperman with a deadline, and an Egyptian physician who taught himself font engineering for fun (or that what I imagine about him). Walking through these, ended up to be the most enjoyable couple of weeks in that job, and I want to go through it here too. And then wow, does it deliver. Don't read my article, go read Saleh's instead, or at least read it first. Still here? Then a disclaimer: I do not know Arabic, not even all the letters, yet. I tried hard to get the details right in this article, but I expect there are…
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