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Lateef Alpha2 Version 1.300 (test release)

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@LornaSIL LornaSIL released this 29 Nov 21:40
· 494 commits to master since this release
v1.300-alpha2
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We’re happy to announce Lateef Alpha2 is now available for testing. An alpha means that the font is not ready for production use, although you may find it useful already. This release provides fonts with a complete set of all the Arabic script characters in the Arabic and Arabic-Supplement blocks as well as most of the characters in the Arabic Extended-A block (through Unicode 13.0).

There are six weights in 3 font families:

  • Lateef Alpha2 Light family (Regular and Bold fonts)
  • Lateef Alpha2 family (Regular and Bold fonts)
  • Lateef Alpha2 Book family (Regular and Bold fonts)

Providing Feedback

It would be useful if you could send us feedback as you discover issues (rather than sending all the feedback at the end), so that we can prioritise and begin work on these. Screenshots, annotated where necessary, are very useful to visualize reported issues. If you need a design change, it is also helpful if you can quantify that, e.g. “20% bigger” or “similar to the instroke of initial Beh”, etc. We’re also interested in what worked well for you.

We really need people to install and use the font for about a month. We’d like you to test the fonts in the applications that you use for Arabic text. Testing in FLeX, InDesign, LibreOffice, Word, XeTeX, Paratext, Bloom, SAB, etc. would be especially welcome. Please include in your feedback the application version and OS version you used.

Note that the fonts are called “Lateef Alpha2” to allow them to be installed alongside other versions of our Lateef fonts.

Testing

We’re particularly interested in feedback in the following areas:

  • Spacing (horizontal only; linespacing has not yet been fine-tuned)
  • Collisions
  • Mark positioning
  • Features
  • Punctuation where Arabic and Latin script are mixed (to test Arabic and Latin variations of punctuations marks)
  • Characters, marks or features specific to language(s) you are using
  • Proportional Arabic digits (now the default)

Changes for this version

  • Removed Graphite from the font
  • Added kerning
  • Added Arabic characters
  • Added proportional Arabic digits (now the default in running text)
  • Redesign of "hat" and "v" component
  • Redesign of U+FDF2
  • Revised Arabic quotation marks, commas, period
  • Small changes to some glyphs including maddah, imala e, ain, waw
  • Slight changes to some sidebearings based on user feedback
  • Improved mark positioning
  • Fixed bug using kashida-justification in Word (where the lam-alef ligature would break)
  • Removed support for Sindhi-style comma when Sindhi language is selected

Known issues

  • This version of the font has not had the linespacing values evaluated, so there is
  • no need to report vertical linespacing issues.
  • This version does not yet implement the latest Allah rendering rules.
  • This version does not include kerning for the proportional Arabic digits
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