Thomas Milo

You never know where a story might lead you or what questions it may leave unanswered. Take for example a story we did in January about a campaign to make the dumpling emoji a reality. Jennifer 8. Lee told us that emojis have to be approved by something called the Unicode Consortium. They're the group that creates the standards that enable people around the world to use computers in any language. She mentioned their membership includes not just tech companies like Apple, Google and Facebook -- but countries, such Oman.

And that made us wonder what this one Middle Eastern country was doing there with all of those tech giants! That led us to Thomas Milo, a pioneer of computer typography and encoding. He's a partner with DecoType in the Netherlands, a company that's long been working with Arabic script technology. He also happens to be Oman's primary representative at the Unicode Consortium.

Es ist vor allem die große Vielfalt an Schriftarten, die den Koran mehr als alle anderen Bücher neben einem religiösen Buch zu einem Kunstwerk macht. Das führt jedoch auch zu Problemen, vor allem im Internet. Wer dort nach einer einem einheitlichen Schriftbild sucht, sucht bisher vergebens.

[NOTE: The captions of fig 6 and 7 have images of fig 7 and fig 6]

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 their measurements 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. This makes it all the more relevant to come to terms with Arabic.

"Like all multi-lingual computing, Arabic computing is now firmly in the domain of Unicode. Unicode is an industrial protocol with the status of international agreement. It is designed to encode the elements of all known script systems in such a way that they become interchangeable between programs and operating systems. Its implementation is well underway.

Unicode eliminates the need to tamper with fonts to get special characters, but it is not a font. For legible text on screen and paper, Unicode depends on compatible fonts with the required characters, where necessary with additional dedicated font technology."

A prototype system for the transliteration of diacriticsless Arabic manuscripts at the sub-word or part of Arabic word (PAW) level is developed. The system is able to read sub-words of the input manuscript using a set of skeleton-based features. A variation of the system is also developed which reads archigraphemic Arabic manuscripts, which are dot-less, into archigraphemes transliteration. In order to reduce the complexity of the original highly multiclass problem of sub-word recognition, it is redefined into a set of binary descriptor classifiers. The outputs of trained binary classifiers are combined to generate the sequence of sub-word letters. SVMs are used to learn the binary classifiers. Two specific Arabic databases have been developed to train and test the system. One of them is a database of the Naskh style. The initial results are promising. The systems could be trained on other scripts found in Arabic manuscripts.

From the Preface:
"This book is a journalistic account of a scholarly discussion about the origins of the Islam. This discussion has already been smoldering for about 150 years, but has flared up in the past seven years.
This is a high stakes debate.  It revolves around core tenets, opening questions of whether Muhammad was a historical person or not, and whether the Koran was truly revealed within twenty-three years to a single person or if it is a book compiled by many authors and editors over a period of centuries.
Since the nineteenth century, Christians have become used to scholars critically studying the historicity of Jesus and the origin of the various biblical passages. Until now, the Muslim world has been less open to subject their own religion to academic research and even a number of western Islamicists shudder  to apply the same ‘clinical,’ skeptical approach to Islam that has been applied to Christianity.
There is one thing upon which everyone agrees: between 600 CE and 800 CE something remarkable happened in the Middle-East. In 600 CE Islam did not exist. However, two hundred years later, Islam was the dominant religion in a world empire that extended from Spain to the Indus. That much is clear, but the question is what happened in the meantime.
The opinions about this vary tremendously. The classical, orthodox account can be found in almost any popular introduction to Islam or biography of the Prophet Muhammad.  A reader looking for general knowledge about Islam in a random book is likely to get only this orthodox account, if they are lucky with some critical notes.
Western scholars studying Islam, Islamicists, will naturally not say that Muhammad received his revelations from the angel Gabriel, because this is a statement of pure belief, which one can only support as a confirmed Muslim.  They often doubt the hadith, transmitted statements attributed to Muhammad, as well. However, they adopt other important elements of the orthodox account. Surprisingly, many ex-Muslims who left their religion do the same thing.
One of them is none other than Salman Rushdie, the author of the book The Satanic Verses. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran called upon Muslims throughout the world to kill Rushdie because of his “blasphemous book.”  In the summer of 2005 in an article in Trouw [a Dutch newspaper], the same Rushdie made a plea for reform to guide Islam into modernity. Within his argument, one sentence attracts the attention: “It should be very important for all Muslims to realize Islam is the only religion with a historically fixed origin. Its origins are totally rooted in facts, not in legends.”1
Rushdie, the epitome of Muslim renegades who was sentenced to death by Khomeini, accepts the transmitted account of the ancient Islamic history without any critique.
Revisionist Islamicists do not uncritically accept this account. This book is about their ideas. They aim their critique on the traditional account at different facets.  For instance, they refuse to use old biographies of the prophet Muhammad as historical sources for academic research on his life as they are barely supported by the Quran. The Quran does not have much to say about Muhammad; one cannot find his detailed biography in the holy text. According to revisionists, it is only possible to have an uninhibited approach to the Quran when scholars let the text speak for itself detached from unverifiable and often improbable stories about the prophet and statements attributed to him.
They want to apply the methods, which have been used since the 19th Century to research the Bible academically uninfluenced by religious convictions, even if this should, for example, lead to the conclusion that the Quran had more than one author with many of its different sections coming from various centuries.
Revisionists attribute a great importance to archeology, archeo-linguistics and numismatics (the study of coins). When archeological evidence disagrees with traditional Islamic histories, these scholars side with archeology. In particular, coin inscriptions from the earliest period of Islam often contradict what previous historians have claimed. Coins are contemporary witnesses whereas Islamic history only began to be written a few centuries later, hence the preference by revisionist scholars for the coins."

Tasmeem (Arabic both for "design" and "sense of purpose") adds to Adobe InDesign a series of functions that are essential for Arabic typesetting and publishing. It takes the form of a user interface to handle DecoType's Advanced Composition Engine or ACE (previously known as Arabic Calligraphic Engine) and any font that is compatible with it. Tasmeem returns to the sources of the Arabic script traditions, to liberate the new generation of high-tech savvy designers and offer them a real Arabic-friendly environment.
Tasmeem-based typography and typefaces feature in New York University's seminal Library of Arabic Literature.
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/book-review-the-new-library-of-arabic-literature-is-a-monument-of-state-of-the-art-scholarship

Until recently, Arabic text representation was the exclusive domain of professional calligraphers and typographers. Today it revolves around elusive computer codes and ugly fonts. Yet, scholars are expected to be able to handle literary text, archaic text as well as contemporary Qur'anic text with so-called word processors. The industry attempts to cater for such requirements, but it must do so practically without participation or professional input of academic specialists. Consequently the potential of philological computing, in fields like database research, networking and publishing, remains largely untapped.

For the creation of a complete model for handling Arabic script with information technology, exhaustive understanding of its structure is imperative. Creating such such a model involves linguistically sound computer-aided transcription for efficient data entry on the one hand and historically correct script images as professional output on the other. This is the kind of exercise where one cannot afford to take anything for granted regarding Arabic text representation.

This approach forces one to explore the opportunities of Unicode-based information technology for Arabic philology. While addressing key issues of Arabic computing, this paper takes the requirements of Qur'anic studies as the central theme: computer-aided transcription to input a clean data structure related to graphemes and archigraphemes as well as correctly shaped typography that incorporates precise rules for allographic assimilation.

The paper is based on the results of research into two faces of Arabic text: computer-aided Latin transcription and computer-synthesized Arabic script.

The technology under scrutiny creates the conditions for contrastive analysis of digital Arabic text and computer-synthesized calligraphy. This reveals unexpected relations between calligraphy, spelling and possibly even text history.

Arabic and English manual for the first computer naskh typeface with variations. The typeface was not driven by smart font technology, but static. For this reason it consisted of 31 fonts, each with a fixed selection of variation features . Inside the fonts, the smallest number of glyphs was used, while each glyph was made with the smallest number of points, so that all 31 fonts files plus the instructions fitted on a single 1.4 MB floppy disk.
The text was set using Microsoft Word for Windows, with the very DecoType Professional Naskh font set that it describes. This font introduced novel features like variation and stretch that raised the level of ambition and interest in classic features throughout the design world.

Turkish language politics of the 1930's in the light of contemporary historical and hysterical linguistic theory.
In passing, this document pioneers multilingual typesetting with the IBM Selectric typewriter and two dozen different text grenades.

Introduction based on the Dr Peter Karow Award lecture, followed by the ATypI 2013 talk: 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 orientalists. 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 orientalists. Today’s mainstream computer typefaces are the legacy of this approach.

Thomas Milo is the president of DecoType. Unlike any other player in this field, DecoType develops font technology that takes into the equation the Islamic calligraphic tradition and the requirements for both modern and classical Arabic orthography. DecoType has been working on Arabic script technology since 1982, in the course of which they pioneered the concept of Dynamic Font (Smart Font, Intelligent Font) DecoType has a close partnership with WinSoft, France.

Arabic vs. Eurabic: Since the 16th century, Western Orientalists have dismissed the functional structure of the Arabic script, viewing it rather as an irrelevant aberration, calligraphy. They therefore have neglected the study and analysis of this characteristic aspect of the Islamic civilization. Nonetheless, unsuspecting letter foundries and typographers have always sought expertise from precisely such scholars educated with this atitude. As a result, within the family of Semitic scripts, a new sub-variant for the notation of Arabic written languages was inadvertently created, namely Eurabic. In the Islamic world - where this kind of script was initially cast aside as illegible - the use of Eurabic typography was traditionally limited to newspapers and magazines. However, with the rapid rise of superficially Arabized computer technology and the spread of the Internet, the Eurabic phenomenon has begun to take firm root in the Islamic world.
(Talk given at the ATypI Conference in Reykjavik in 2011)

An arzuhal or petition to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire dated 1283 a.h. (1865-66 a.d.) came in my possession in 1983. With this document Mühendisoğlu asks, in Ottoman Turkish, permission to use the first valid nesih/naskh typeface ever designed. He explains how he used the handwriting of the kazasker Mustafa İzzet Efendi, şeyh-ül-hattatin (leading calligrapher), to accomplish this historical achievement.
This talk will present a critical analysis of how well Mühendisoğlu reproduced Mustafa İzzet Efendi’s nesih handwriting, and to what extent he gleaned the generic naskh (nesih) script grammar from it. This analysis will be the basis for a detailed critique of Tetterode alias the Amsterdam Type Foundry’s 1910 copy of the original typeface by Mühendisoğlu, by means of a contrastive analysis of the Tetterode typeface with computer-generated generic nesih (using the DecoType Naskh typeface).
In the quest to understand the Middle Eastern perspective on Arabic typography this petition provided an essential clue. From it followed logically that new technology had to be developed, as none of the existing methods were designed to handle actual script practice.

Some time ago G.-R. Puin (WiKi) sent me some boxes of slides that he made in 1984 of one of the most remarkable of the Qurʾān fragments found in the Ṣanʿāʾ cache discovered in the 1970s, manuscript DAM 15-15-2. The specimens are written with a very steady, consistent hand and the letter forms are of irresistible beauty. What makes Puin’s photography extraordinary, is his attention to detail and the fact that the slides are made in colour. He provided me with the images suggesting that I create a typeface based on this handwriting to be used for the long-awaited production of a critical edition of the Qurʾān based on the earliest fragments. The background of Puin's request is that conventional Arabic computer typography does not handle traditional Arabic styles, let alone that it can reliably render palaeographic script, a requirement for scholarly typesetting of a text-edition of the Qurʾān. A comparison between the script of this particular, but representative Ṣanʿāʾ manuscript and a random typeface in the kūfī style exposes fundamentally different structures. All typefaces currently marketed as kūfī have essentially the same structure. To design historically accurate Arabic typefaces, fundamental research is a prerequisite. The resulting analysis I would like to call a script grammar; the resulting font a script synthesis.

""Before even the English original was published, Tom Holland presented the Dutch translation of his work in Amsterdam. After an introduction of about an hour, a discussion follows, first with Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort, then Thomas Milo joins the fray.""