A System for Graphically Generating Arabic Characters

The Arabic-Urdu-Farsi family of languages is used by over 300 million people. Unlike letters of the Roman alphabet, each Arabic character can assume different shapes which leads to a more compact representation of linguistic information, but which also causes increased difficulties in printing. In previous work IHyder, 1971], a grammatical model was developed which determines the appropriate shape of a character as a function of the linking characteristics of adjacent letters during the generation of a word. As an outgrowth of this previous work, a system has been developed which graphically generates characters of the Arabic alphabet by using simple geometric primitives such as points, straight lines and arcs. Analysis has indicated that the various shapes of Arabic letters (over 100 in number) can be constructed from 35 subforms or primitives and 5 point configurati ons. A maximum of four primitives and one character dependent pattern of points are used to construct a character form . A context sensitive grammar has been developed for generating the graphic shapes and implemented on a CDC 1700/1747 digigraphic system. Some examples of character shapes generated by the grammar are given. The approach has possible applications in printing, photo type-setting and telecommunication of the Arabic-Farsi-Urdu family of languages.