The Problem of Stretching in Persian Calligraphy and a New Type 3 PostScript Nastaliq Font

Abstract

This research is about a typeface for implementing Persian calligraphy called Nastaliq. The main purpose for developing this font was to handle stretching of letters in order to achieve line justification through a dynamic font. Therefore, a PostScript Type 3 font was developed. However, as the research progressed, it came clear that Nastaliq’s stretching cannot be implemented in a dynamic font. Therefore, the research’s purpose changes to implementing a font containing all the needed glyphs of all needed stretchings of all stretchable letters to allow achieving line justification. For this propose a mathematical formulation to model handwritten Nastaliq was necessary. The result was a PostScript font containing more than 1200 glyphs. To make it possible to use this font in the future, a regular expression grammar was developed to identify and name each glyph as a positioned letter in a particular context. This thesis describes all the steps taken to build the font.