Editors’ Summary: This post considers the historical background behind the difficulty of rendering Arabic typography online. The author uses an example of a project where the Arabic prose was rendered with a ragged left edge, even though the team explicitly specified justified text. This issue had nothing to do with the specific stylesheet of the project, but rather the state of Arabic typography on the web. The difficulty of every machine since the Gutenberg press to represent Arabic script is in part due to the structural fact that Arabic is always in cursive. This post provides a detailed historical background, going back five hundred years, to explain the reasons behind this typographic disparity.
Editors’ Choice: An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt
