Slanted font styles (Italic, Oblique, Iranic, ...)

[behnam]

As discussed on the weekly meeting, we want to document the existing methods for using slanted text, slanted to the left or to the right, as it's been a common practice for the past few decades.

The goal is to document the details of the existing methods, and try to find the common names for them.

Also, we want to note that using slanted text is not a traditional way of emphasis/quotation/etc, but a half-baked borrowing from Latin-script Italic/Oblique methods.

[behnam]

"Ketab-e Kuche" calls the feature ایرانیک (Iranic):

It can be used inline:

Or on a whole line/paragraph:

[behnam]

A few examples from Persian Grammer (Parviz Natel-Khanlari, 1976), which includes normal and left-slanted Persian text, and roman and italic Latin text.:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 

[behnam]

On the existing font practices, Adobe Arabic has an "Italic" variation:

https://typekit.com/fonts/adobe-arabic

[r12a]

What i found interesting about Adobe Arabic Italic is that embedded Latin letters lean to the right at the same time as Arabic letters lean to the left. Is that to be expected?

Regular:

Italic:

[khaledhosny]

Amiri does the same and that is what I’d expect from a font where Arabic is leaning to the left.

[behnam]

In current digital typesetting systems, it's what @khaledhosny said.

BUT, actually, there are evidence of slanting direction being applied paragraph-/page-/document-wide. This talk (by @lironlavitur) covers the topic (mostly) for the case of Hebrew, but the concepts are general and apply to Arabic script similarly: https://www.typotalks.com/videos/go-bolder-just-slant-it/

So, @r12a, IMHO what you see is one correct possibility (and the most common one when there's leaning-to-left support for RTL text), but having paragraph-/page-/document-wide should be also noted as an option, specially something to experiment more with.

[khaledhosny]

Here is an example of forward slanted Arabic type from the first issue of Al Ahram newspaper:

[r12a]

and another example in the type sample repo: https://github.com/w3c/type-samples/issues/14