TAC 2015 - eskandar (French, Arabic, Urdu)

[eskandar]

It might just be you. The formatting looks normal to me, except that the paragraph margins are just a tiny bit wider than elsewhere. I'm on Chrome in Windows, so it could be your browser/OS perhaps?

Edit: hopefully the issue is moot now that the thread has started a new page - at least until there are some more posts in Urdu or Arabic...

[dEhiN]

No offense, but is it just me, or is the formatting of this thread really messed up (I guess because of how some of the posts are entirely in Urdu and then others in English )?

No it's messed up for me too, and I'm on Chrome on Linux. The first several posts up until the last post in Urdu (or Arabic ) are all shifted to the right for a RTL style. It's weird though because that includes all the first few posts in English.

[vijayjohn]

For me, at least, it's basically just that the margins look somewhat wider (see the pic below):

unilang.png

[eskandar]

Very weird. I don't have that RTL issue, dEhiN. Vijay, the margins look slightly wider like that for me as well, but the real issue I see in your screenshot is that the Urdu text does not display properly at all!! That would drive me completely insane. It's weird how many language font/formatting issues other people seem to have on a site dedicated to language enthusiasts. Over on the Arabic forum, Babelfish has trouble whenever I post using my Persian keyboard to type Arabic, since it doesn't display properly for him.

[vijayjohn]

Vijay, the margins look slightly wider like that for me as well, but the real issue I see in your screenshot is that the Urdu text does not display properly at all!! That would drive me completely insane.

Haha yeah, I guess I just started getting used to it. (Maybe now you can see why I kept spelling کہ wrong and could never tell until you pointed it out ). If it displayed properly, I'd probably just stare at it for hours because Nasta'liq is so damn pretty!

It's weird how many language font/formatting issues other people seem to have on a site dedicated to language enthusiasts. Over on the Arabic forum, Babelfish has trouble whenever I post using my Persian keyboard to type Arabic, since it doesn't display properly for him.

Well, there are all these fonts out there, and it's hard to make sure you've got all the fonts you'll end up needing, because for any one orthography there are probably at least five different fonts. When I was a teenager, I used to have tons of fonts on my computer because I kept downloading fonts to learn bits and pieces of various languages, so much that my dad was kind of bewildered by the large number of fonts. I'm pretty sure he told me not to download too many. But then when that computer either died or got a virus, those fonts didn't make it onto my next machine, and after that, I guess I just got tired of trying to download all necessary fonts all over again - either that, or I couldn't really tell when I needed to do that and when I didn't and tried to see how well I could get by without doing it.

Maaaaaybe it's about time I re-evaluated my decision...

[eskandar]

I guess it's just so surprising to me because I assumed that in the year 2015, anyone's standard OS would be able to properly display Arabic text (and its variants, ie. Persian and Urdu) without them having to go out of their way to download special fonts. Apparently that's just wishful thinking on my part. I do have a few Arabic, Persian, and Urdu fonts installed that I use for composing stuff in MS Word, but as far as I remember, my computer displayed those languages just fine right out of the box. (Android is a different story. I had a spate of issues getting Arabic to show up correctly on my phone years back - then, after the issue was resolved, they changed the default font for Arabic to some horrifically ugly font, which took me forever to figure out how to change )

[vijayjohn]

From what I remember, getting text in Arabic and Persian to display correctly has never been an issue with me personally. It's always Urdu and Pashto that I find so problematic on the computer.

[dEhiN]

Very weird. I don't have that RTL issue, dEhiN. Vijay, the margins look slightly wider like that for me as well, but the real issue I see in your screenshot is that the Urdu text does not display properly at all!!

When I said RLT that's really what I meant - Vijay's screenshot is exactly how it looks for me. I just assumed that was what a whole page shifted for RTL reading would look like . As for the text issue, I don't have enough experience with Urdu/Arabic/Persian/Pashto/etc. to tell when the text is not displaying properly, unless it's grossly off.

Regarding fonts, I would've thought with the creation of unicode and unicode fonts, all that would necessary would be for any system to use its default unicode font. But apparently that's not the case. I guess maybe it's because a full unicode font (whether you get it free, illegally, or pay for it) is usually quite huge to support the full set. Hence most phones probably use a stripped-down set.

When I was a teenager, I used to have tons of fonts on my computer because I kept downloading fonts to learn bits and pieces of various languages, so much that my dad was kind of bewildered by the large number of fonts. I'm pretty sure he told me not to download too many. But then when that computer either died or got a virus, those fonts didn't make it onto my next machine, and after that, I guess I just got tired of trying to download all necessary fonts all over again - either that, or I couldn't really tell when I needed to do that and when I didn't and tried to see how well I could get by without doing it.

Maaaaaybe it's about time I re-evaluated my decision...

Yeah I always kept a separate copy of all my fonts on my ext hd. I would either keep the zip/rar file (if it was one I downloaded) or just copy the ttf file from my WIndows font directory. Now that I'm on Linux Mint, I need to figure out how to install those fonts back and get them to show up in apps.

[vijayjohn]

Hmm, I would've thought what you (dEhiN) and I are seeing is the Unicode font for Urdu, and that eskandar uses a font that displays the text better.

[eskandar]

There's no way the standard Unicode font can't even properly display Urdu... Here's what it looks like for me:

[dEhiN]

To my untrained eye the fonts themselves look the same. Even comparing sizing of the exclamation point, the point of the comma on the second line contrasted to the first line, etc. - all of those are the same. The only difference is that the margins of the thread itself (the grey borders) are off. As I said I thought it was an RTL style only because those posts with the off-margins have a left indent. But then they also have a right indent.

[Meera]

David that's just how Urdu is. It is written opposite of English. Even on these Urdu sites the pages look similar:

http://www.urduvoa.com/

http://www.bbc.com/urdu


http://dailypakistan.com.pk/

[vijayjohn]

You know what, Eskandar Bhai, I guess it is weird. I have this problem everywhere on my computer, with both Firefox and Chrome. Urdu and I think Pashto don't show up correctly, but Arabic and Persian do. You've already seen what Urdu looks like on my machine; just for comparison, here's what Arabic looks like:

arabic.png

Mmph, I was going to show you Persian, too, but apparently it's too big or something.

Also, on the BBC website, it used to be the case that they offered to let you download special fonts in order to view the articles on their Urdu and Pashto services correctly, and I had to make use of those at first. Now there is no such thing, but both of them look fine (as far as the font goes. There are no problems with the Arabic or Persian services either). However, on bbc.com at least, پښتو shows up as four separate characters instead of being connected together as it should be.

[eskandar]

Vijay bhai, if you want, try installing an Urdu font like Nafees Nastaliq or Jameel Noori Nastaleeq and see if that helps. Alternatively, you can use a Chrome extension like this one (or a similar Firefox extension) to set the default font to Tahoma on sites like Unilang where you want to view Urdu. Tahoma supports Urdu well and so it should render properly that way. Not sure if any of that will resolve the issue with Pashto as well, but it might.

[vijayjohn]

Thanks, Eskandar Bhai! Maybe I'll try those.

[eskandar]

For the past several weeks of lessons I've been reading all kinds of random stuff in Arabic: lots of old news articles, Wikipedia, poems, about 25 pages of أنبياء الله ("The Prophets of God") by Ahmad Bahgat, and of course lots of short readings from the textbook we're using (العربية بين يديك - which, by the way, sucks). Additionally I've watched a couple of Al-Jazeera Arabic documentaries. I'm about to start reading my first full novel in Arabic, and maybe I'll track my progress here. The novel I picked is سراج ("Siraaj") by Radwa Ashour; it's only 116 pages, so I'm hoping I can get through it before I have to leave Cairo. Apparently it's been translated into English, but I don't have access to the English translation so I can't cheat!

[eskandar]

Arabic

Finally managed to start Siraaj. I'm only nine pages in so it's hard to decide if I like it or not yet. Reading a novel is more challenging than I anticipated (or maybe it's the particular one I chose, with its historical, bucolic setting) as there are just so many words I have to look up, compared to newspaper articles that usually have a much more limited well of vocabulary to draw from. It's hard just to keep up with creating flashcards for all the new vocabulary I write down, ranging from really simple words that I just never happened to learn, like ذراع (arm), to fairly specific ones I might not even encounter again, like قبقاب (wooden clog).

French

I thought I'd put French aside, but some long email exchanges with a friend, alternating between Arabic and French, led me to spend some time with it today (which isn't a bad thing, of course). Apparently the only glaring mistake I made was writing *"dans le milieu de Septembre" instead of "à la mi-Septembre" and otherwise I was complimented on my epistolary abilities in both languages. It's nice to know that having to write the occasional email for work in France paid off!

[eskandar]

Arabic

Today I finished reading all of Al-`arabiyya bayna yadayk volume 2 (~435 pages) which I started using with my tutor in July. We skipped a lot of the exercises (as they're mostly very easy) and just did the reading sections and the grammar. The advantage of this book is that it's 100% in Arabic, but otherwise I wouldn't recommend it. It's light on grammar, and the readings are almost always so ridiculously conservative and pedantic that they're not much fun to read, unless you like learning about how much better things were in the old days when kids obeyed their parents and women didn't work outside the home. I did like that some of the longer/more difficult readings were excerpted from real Arabic publications rather than being specially prepared for learners. I don't think I'll be bothering with volume 3 anytime soon. I did start Al-kitaab volume 2 today, much of which will be review, but I like the layout of the series and the grammar exercises are worthwhile.

Very slowly plugging away at Siraaj (currently a whopping 18 pages in) and Anbiyaa' allah (on page 88). I'm still hoping to finish the former in the next month, but the latter (over 500 pages) will definitely take me a while.

[vijayjohn]

the readings are almost always so ridiculously conservative and pedantic that they're not much fun to read, unless you like learning about how much better things were in the old days when kids obeyed their parents and women didn't work outside the home.

This reminds me of my brother's best friend's Iranian first-grade textbook. You know, the kind that begins with a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini, with every single female depicted wearing either a hijab or a chador and no one playing any games more sophisticated than either jumping rope or playing around with a nondescript ball. Sometimes the conservatism is kind of interesting in itself. Towards the end, there's this one-page passage called "آزادی" that says birds don't like to be caged because they want to be free, and humans also like freedom, but humans are not birds and need laws because (if I understood correctly) anything we do has consequences!

[eskandar]

Haha, I wonder when/where those textbooks were produced. The Iranian grade-school textbooks I've seen were not quite so explicitly ideological. I'm also really curious about who produced and published Al-`arabiyya bayna yadayk - the whole enterprise screams 'Gulf money' but I don't know anything specific.