To make it easier to design Gulzar, font engineer Simon Cozens created two open source tools. Simon Cozens was the Gulzar font engineer. Since he didn’t speak or read Urdu, he embarked on self-study of the written language. Urdu is written from right to left. Like other languages using the Arabic writing system, the same letter in Urdu has different forms depending on its position in the word (initial, medial, final and unconnected).
“I gained familiarity with the script by carefully examining Urdu poetry, religious texts, and other materials. First, I learned to recognize the rhythm and overall feel of the design. Then I associated individual letters with one another, until finally I was able to recognize them in their different contextual forms (initial, medial, final, and unconnected),” explained Cozens.
Cozens worked with the designers to set up a method for creating a set of glyphs for the font. In the Nasta’liq style, each joining letter must connect smoothly to the one on its left and/or right with the correct stroke thickness and direction, following the calligraphy rules for the reed pen, the conventional writing tool used for Nasta’liq.
These are combinations of letters, not words.
Basic shapes of the letters without dots (from right to left):
ب Beh in (green)
ھ , Heh Doachasmee (white)
س, Seen (orange)
1: The default form of initial Beh (green) ends with an upward stroke when connecting to the letter Seen (orange).
2: When a calligrapher writes the sequence Beh + Heh (green + white), the pen stroke does not turn upwards (as shown in the middle) but must continue to flow smoothly downwards into the middle stroke of the Heh (white).
3. Final result for the Beh + Heh combination: The glyph used for Beh (green) must be changed to a different variant that reflects the pen’s movement into the Heh (white).
In Gulzar, there are 20 different possible variations for the initial form of the letter Beh, depending on the letter to its left. Each of those 20 variations of the letter must connect smoothly to the next letter.
Basic letter shapes without dots:
1. ک, Kaaf (green)
2. ب, Beh (orange)
3. ھ, Heh (white)
4. ں, Noon ghunna (purple)
Both sequences start with the same two letters (Kaaf #1 in green and Beh #2 in orange). Yet both the Kaaf and Beh letterforms are different in each sequence. Different Beh variants were selected based on the letter to its left. Since the Beh variants have different stroke thicknesses, appropriate variants of the Kaaf are chosen to match the Beh’s stroke thickness.
In Gulzar, there are 9686 potential letter combinations. There are various initial or medial forms of 29 letters of the Urdu alphabet that could potentially connect to one of 334 different variants to the left of the letter.
In some of the previous Urdu fonts, designers had to calculate and draw all the possible thousands of letter combinations. This was an arduous and costly task. Few font foundries wanted to take on such a large financial undertaking requiring a large staff and budget.
To facilitate the Gulzar design process, font engineer Simon Cozens created two open source tools. To avoid the need to hand draw the letter combinations and to simplify the management of letterform variants and combinations, Cozens created the Nasta’liq Connection Editor, a Glyphs font editor extension using OpenType technology. He drew on the innovative patented work that Ross and her colleagues, Michael Fellows and Timothy Hollway, had done to make the Sheeraz and Qalmi fonts without the need for such extensive character sets.
The Nasta’liq Connection Editor extension allows the type designer to easily choose the intended form of each letter from a spreadsheet (left) and see how the two characters looked in the preview panel (right). (The extension can also be used for any Arabic writing style, not just Nasta’liq.)
