In January of 2016, the Unicode Consortium celebrated its 25^th year.In the past quarter century, Unicode went from being an idea to being the ubiquitous standard for encoding and processing text, just as the Web went from being an idea to being the ubiquitous way we organize information—and our lives.In this talk, Amazon’s globalization architect and W3C Internationalization Working Group Chair, Addison Phillips, will talk about how Unicode got here and how progress in Unicode has led to efforts to enable rich publishing, restore languages, and invigorate cultural traditions that might otherwise have been lost.

This tutorial will provide you with a good understanding of the many unique characteristics of non-Latin writing systems, and illustrate the problems involved in implementing such scripts in products. It does not provide detailed coding advice, but does provide the essential background information you need to understand the fundamental issues related to Unicode deployment, across a wide range of scripts. The tutorial goes beyond encoding issues to discuss characteristics related to input of ideographs, combining characters, context-dependent shape variation, text direction, vowel signs, ligatures, punctuation, wrapping and editing, font issues, sorting and indexing, keyboards, and more. The concepts are introduced through the use of examples from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Hindi/Tamil, Russian and Greek.

The Unicode Standard provides a firm foundation for the digital processing of text in the Arabic script. Beginning with the basic coverage for the Arabic language, the character set also supports the requirements of numerous other languages from around the globe. Besides enumerating them, Unicode also defines the intrinsic attributes and behavior of all the required characters, thus providing an infrastructure for rendering text. Recognized as an international standard, OpenType is a widely accepted rendering system that provides the necessary building blocks for rendering text in Arabic script. By using examples from real fonts, we will examine the features of OpenType that not only render Arabic type correctly, but is also able to emulate a variety of calligraphic and typographic styles.

This tutorial explains how to use new features in HTML5 to address problems encountered when authoring web pages in a right-to-left language or when authoring bidirectional content within a page. It offers a step-by-step guide for content authors to use the features provided in order to work more easily and effectively with Arabic, Hebrew, Thaana, and other right-to-left scripts.

Beginning with a relatively complex Arabic font, we will discuss its architecture and enumerate the various OpenType features that enable it. We first examine the substitution phase of OpenType to demonstrate the progressive refinement of the rendered glyph shapes. From the substitution phase, we move on to the positioning phase where contiguous letters are sewn together into words, and combining marks attach themselves to the letters they belong to. Throughout the discussion of the two phases, we will repeatedly refer to the glyph attributes that undergird the whole rendering process.

Internet necessitates and Unicode facilitates multilingual typography on a scale never seen before. As a result, multilingual typesetting, something that used to be an obscure academic specialism, suddenly sprung to the limelight. Since printing with movable type originated in Europe in a Latin-scripted environment, other scripts still tend to be treated as a complement to Latin script and normalized accordingly. The challenge that designers are facing is to create computer typography that does justice to all scripts and cultures, according to their own standards. Typography is therefore dependent on expertise of the original writing system. This makes it all the more relevant to come to terms with Arabic. In the field of Latin typography thorough and at times passionate research with an eye for the finest detail is the order of the day. Arabic typography started at the beginning of the 16th century, not in the heartlands of the Islamic cultures, but in Europe, as a by-product of Latin typography. This “extra-cultural” typography lacked this intimate relation with Arabic script expertise completely. It was a typography that would serve European scholars. But notably, the three core aspects of Arabic writing, to wit calligraphy, style and system have never been on the curriculum of orientalists nor on that of the Western typographers who depended on these orientalists. Today’s mainstream computer typefaces are the legacy of this process.