In fact, the whole layout must reflect this directionality. Arabic text must be typeset to reflect this: text that is left aligned in English should generally become right aligned in Arabic. Arabic runs in the other direction: the text starts on the right-hand side of the line and reads on to the left. Yet, for those used to other languages, Arabic typesetting contains some stumbling blocks.Ī line of English text starts at the left-hand side and is read from the left to the right. So it is no surprise that Arabic frequently crops up in multilingual typesetting projects. Arabic is an official language in 26 countries, the third most frequent behind English and French. Geographically it is a key language in a wide belt stretching from Morocco across north Africa via Libya and Egypt through the Middle East to the Gulf states in the East such as UAE and Oman. Today, it is spoken as a first language by 280 million people.
Arabic typesetting and calligraphy also has a long history, as described in this excellent ilovetypography article, “Arabic calligraphy as a typographic exercise”. The Arabic language has a long cultural history, with Classical Arabic stretching back to least the 4th Century. Arabic is one of the world’s great languages.
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