>> BTW, I heard strange things about baselines, such as that the baseline for >> Indic fonts should be near the top of letters, while for good Arabic >> typography it should be oblique. Can someone confirm these notions?
VI> The baseline of Arabic (in general meaning) typographical fonts VI> (Nasx) is horizontal and must be aligned to the VI> Latin-Cyrillic-Greek baseline. Beside that handwritten scripts VI> like Nastaliq or Tahriri have an oblique baseline for each word. One should note that handwritten scripts like Nasta`liq are handwritten only because there exist little adequate typesetting solutions. These scripts are used in print, mainly through lithography (there were handwritten and lihtographed newspapers until recently, esp. in Pakistan; I don't know whether they still exist, though), and if there were sufficient means to typeset them on the computer, people would use them in print quite extensively. Even now, there's a good number of Nasta`liq fonts under development where the angled baseline is more or less hacked together through OpenType offset operations. VI> The angle of that secondary baseline is 27.5�, like this: I don't think it's fixed 27.5� in handwritten script, it varies quite considerably, partly depending on how much text has to fit in the line in calligraphy. In ordinary handwriting, the angle easily reaches 45� or more. Philipp mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ___________________ Hal, open the file / Hal, open the damn file, Hal / open the, please Hal
