Deciphering Basmala

Arabic is so dense, and Quran came to perfect it. Reading the following verse from Quran, makes me proud that I'm a native Arabic speaker: "إِنَّا أَنزَلْنَاهُ قُرْآنًا عَرَبِيًّا لَّعَلَّكُمْ تَعْقِلُونَ" "Indeed, We have sent it down as an Arabic Qur'an that you might understand." Quran 12:2

﷽ <- the single codepoint the author is talking about.

It's pretty great fun pasting it into various text entry fields to see how they behave.

In standard-ish single-line-ish Apple text fields on my Mac (iMessage text entry field, Chrome Omnibox), it renders like this, which... I'm not sure is correct? https://cleanshot.com/share/0GkNJGQ7

On the other hand it renders akin to Chrome in TextEdit.

This is my favourite single character to demonstrate that you cannot lay text out without knowing the font, which people sometimes try to claim is possible in terminals: in some fonts, it’s 10em wide and less than 1em tall, but in others, it’s under 3em wide and perhaps 2em tall.

(If people aren’t convinced by that, my next area is complex text layout, starting with my name in the Telugu script, <https://temp.chrismorgan.info/క్రిస్.svg>, also augmenting that with how the r can be drawn to the left or underneath or even a little to the right of the k, which I really should add to that SVG file.)

I've been having fun getting better at understanding where the letters begin and end. Something like this is easy for me now:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:-516170388361w7xlt8c...

Next I'm going to learn the rest of the letters and try to start reading menus.

Arabic is a beautiful language.

Seeing Arabic calligraphy has made me add Arabic to the list of languages I am very slowly teaching myself.