Global Type

In a recent Computer Arts magazine there was an article titled “Global Type”, about the rise of non-Latin typefaces and the challenges that go into creating them. I found it extremely interesting, as I had never realized the complications that go into making fonts that don’t use our 26-letter alphabet. I thought I’d highlight some points about three of the languages, in hopes you don’t take for granted how easily we can create a font, in addition to the mass amounts we have to choose from. I know its long… so feel free to read one, two, or all.

ARABIC
Arabic can be difficult to read, tough to write, and problematic to design. The alphabet is made of 28 letters, 17 that are basic forms, and the rest are variations made by adding diacritic marks, or dots, above or below the characters. It is read from right to left, there is no uppercase or lowercase, and no difference between written and printed letters. All of this makes Arabic difficult to design for print. Currently the trend is to Latinize Arabic typefaces, by cutting up pieces of Latin typefaces and putting them together to make up Arabic characters.

CYRILLIC
There are six Slavic languages that use Cyrillic: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian. The alphabet consists of 33 letters (11 vowels, 20 consonants, and two silent letters) and is closely based on Greek. Cyrillic has similarities with Latin letters, but there is little distinction between upper and lowercase. Lowercase letters are essentially small capitals, and in the absence of Roman and italic letterforms, the type fonts are classified as ‘upright’ and ‘cursive.’ Cursive letters are entirely different in shape to their upright equivalents. Modern fonts are closely related to Latin typefaces of the same family, and that will only continue to grow with influence from the western countries.

DEVANAGARI
Devanagari is the script used for Hindi, which is the primary language of Central Government in India. It is read from left to right, and each letter always represents the same sound. There are, however, two major difficulties: most consonants can be joined to form combinations, and vowels are written differently depending on their position in a word and whether they are followed by a vowel or a consonant. Typefaces produced for metal composition were unable to kern, accommodate subscripts and superscripts, and had limited character sets. The result was poor quality illegible typography. The design of a new Devanagari typeface, for filmsetting, was the first step towards legible type. Devanagari was an early entrant to PostScript complete with contextual forms and a huge array of subscripts and superscripts.