Kamal Mansour

An early multilingual education in Cairo, Egypt, served to stimulate Kamal's interest in languages, alphabets, and typography. His studies have spanned Computer Science, Linguistics, and Product Design. Before joining Monotype in 1996 as as Manager of Non-Latin Products, Kamal had worked in various areas of software development for over 15 years, and had developed fonts and keyboards for minority languages. At Monotype, his responsibilities includes growing the library of non-Latin scripts, investigating potential products, in-house consulting, as well as assisting customers with font specifications. Most recently at Monotype, his work has focused on OpenType implementations for various scripts and languages including Latin, Arabic, and other non-Latin scripts. As a result of Kamal's involvement in Unicode-related activities, he has spent a great deal of time exploring the use of Arabic script for non-Semitic languages such as Persian and Urdu.

Nastaliq through OpenType

Noori Nastaliq is a calligraphic Arabic-script typeface originally devised for use on a Monotype image-setter in the 1970s. Once this proprietary equipment became obsolete, Noori Nastaliq could not be readily implemented for many years with then-current technology of digital fonts. With the advent and maturation of OpenType technology, Noori Nastaliq is once again alive. In spite of the many graphic complexities of Nastaliq style such as its oblique alignment to the baseline and its midair cursive connections, OpenType proved sufficient for the task, yielding results that far surpassed the capabilities of the original product.

Nastaliq is a complex calligraphic style used primarily as a display style in many countries, but as the preferred, everyday text style in Pakistan. When looking at a page written in Nastaliq, one has the impression of seeing words suspended from the ceiling by an invisible thread. It has always been a challenge to duplicate the calligraphic intricacies of Nastaliq through mechanized type. The advent of photo- and digital typesetting made it possible to consider a fresh implementation. In the 1970s, Monotype commissioned Pakistani calligrapher Mirza Jamil to create a large collection of Urdu words in Nastaliq style for use on a computer-controlled image-setter. The resulting typeface was called Noori Nastaliq, and is used to this day by the Jang Newspaper in Pakistan. In the early systems, as long as the typed text matched one of the stored word patterns, the imagesetter was capable of producing authentic-looking Nastaliq text. Whenever there was no match, a calligrapher would have to make repairs manually. Such an approach was tolerable in settings where many calligraphers were employed, but could no longer be contemplated today for most environments.

Through the 1990s, Noori Nastaliq could only be supported within the confines of specialized proprietary word processors since the then-available technology for digital fonts did not offer the necessary capabilities. In its current OpenType implementation, Noori Nastaliq style is produced through a judicious mix of ligature-based techniques along with contextually controlled forms. While the use of ligatures ensures faithful reproduction of the original design, the use of contextually based glyph shapes guarantees full coverage for any potential sequence of characters in many different languages.