Scheherazade New Lam-Alif ligature with Hamza issue

SIL Fonts
1

Dear all,

There seems to be an issue with the Lam-Alif ligature with Hamza on top of Alif in InDesign: the Hamza appears above the Lam in stead of above the Alif:

image
image990×373 23.2 KB

This does not happen consistently, and I cannot isolate what causes this. This happens in Indesign (windows) 18.5 and 19.4, and gets exported like this to PDF.

2

Hi Peter, and welcome to the community!

Could you provide some additional information, please:

  • What is the version of Scheherazade New font that you are using?
  • From what site did you download the font?
  • Does the problematic text sequence contain exactly the Unicode character codepoints 0644,0627,0654 or are there different/other characters involved?
4

Dear Bobh,

  1. Version: 4.000
  2. from the SIL website
  3. the sequence is 0644 [ل] followed by 0623 [أ]

I have isolated it a bit further: this happens (not consistenly) when an OpenType diacritic positioning is applied:

image

When ‘normal’ (non-OT) is applied, it appears correct (which is my workaround now):

5

image

6

I’m glad you have a work around. Our code specifically positions the diacritics so we haven’t really thought about how an application might change the position. I’m not sure we want to go there!

Anyway, I also wanted to comment that our latest fonts have different weights, so instead of italicizing the Arabic text (which is certainly unusual) you may just want to choose a different weight to make it look different.

1 Like
7

Dear Lorna,

Thank you. I will just stick with the workaround then.

Yes, the slanted Arabic is a point of discussion, but in this case a specific author request.

Thanks again!