Scheherazade New: Double ANGLE Quotation Marks are ROUND

SIL Fonts
1

If I type a quotation with Scheherazade fonts with the Double Angle Quotation Marks (the French guillemets, U+00AB, U+00BB) in Word, they look fine with the old font (first line), but with Scheherazade New, they are smoothed out and have lost their “angle” (second line):

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What gives? I even see in the sample on the Scheherazade New font design page (Design - Scheherazade New) that the angles are still there:

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I see the same results in LO Writer and even WordPad. And I don’t see any options on the Font Features page. So apparently that’s just the design in the font… But why would you make the Double ANGLE Quotation Marks in this font round? We’ve got some unhappy customers.

Jeff

2

I now see this in the Version History:

2023-04-14 (SIL WSTech team) Scheherazade New version 4.000

New

  • Added Arabic-style (rounded) versions of chevron quotes

Doing some Internet searches, I do see a couple of places where the rounded chevrons are used in Arabic text, but I also see lots of places where the angle brackets are used and referenced, e.g.:

So the question is why, after years of having angle quotes, the Scheherazade New font would shift to the rounded quotes without questioning the user base, and not providing a Font Feature which would allow people to change it back?

3

Thanks for letting us know your concern. Quite a long time ago we were told those angled quotes were wrong for Lateef and we had the request to make them more curved. We did that for version 2.000 of Lateef.

Then, we received this report for Scheherazade: Refining `«»` · Issue #5 · silnrsi/font-scheherazade · GitHub

where it was said:

The above is functional, but this design with a sharp, acute angle is not usually used in Arabic texts. Rather, they use a more curvy and gentle style, making it less jarring to read and feel less foreign:

I’m wondering if the people who are unhappy are expats or local users. Is it because they got used to the angled quotes or is it that in French-speaking regions of Africa the angled quotes are more normal?

At any rate, we are willing to consider adding a feature, but we did do research and realized at least for most regions the more rounded ones were more appropriate. We looked into which codepoints people were using, etc.

If the unhappiness is from non-expats, let us know as an issue on the Github page and we’ll look into adding a feature.