Stylogeny combining Bulaq Naskh Book Printing × Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type

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Style combination · Contrasts

Bulaq Naskh Book Printing × Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type

The full calligraphic repertoire it gave up: a Bulaq-style Naskh title over simplified body text shows exactly what was traded for speed and economy.

From the research on Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type

Mix them and make something Bulaq Naskh Book Printing Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type

OrderBulaqNaskh Book × Machine-Age Simplified
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type, their arrangement from Bulaq Naskh Book Printing, the finish from Bulaq Naskh Book Printing. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

01

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh Book Printing Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type

Type from Bulaq Naskh Book Printing
Colour from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type
Form from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type
Composition from Bulaq Naskh Book Printing
Surface from Bulaq Naskh Book Printing

02

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Bulaq Naskh Book Printing

Order

Rakkas, standing in for Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh body type, 1905–06, drawn by the calligrapher Muhammad Jaʿfar Bey (sources give 1905 or 1906; 406 sorts)

Text · Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type

Arabic redrawn for the machine rather than the reed pen. From 1947 reformers cut down the four positional forms of each letter: Nasri Khattar's Unified Arabic gave every letter one shape, set apart like Latin type in its detached print form, and Linotype's Simplified Arabic (1959, made with Beirut's al-Hayat) mostly two, so a newspaper fount fitted one 90-channel magazine; ASV Codar in Morocco gave the vowels letters of their own. Flat-based, even and with few ligatures, it became the common face of Arab newspapers and lives on in Windows system fonts.

Newsreader; Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type used Mrowa-Linotype Simplified Arabic (Kamel Mrowa, Nabih Jaroudi and Walter Tracy for Linotype & Machinery; Series 2 with 3, 1959) and its redesign by Jaroudi, Series 8 with 9 (1962), named Yakout in 1967 and Intertype Abridged Arabic

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type, with a counter-accent from Bulaq Naskh Book Printing. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh Book Printing Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type

  • #f7f7f5 ground · 36%
  • #141414 ink · 14%
  • #1d4f9e accent · 18%
  • #7a5236 accent · 14%
  • #cfc6b0 accent · 10%
  • #6b6964 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f7f7f5;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #1d4f9e;
  --accent-2: #7a5236;
  --accent-3: #cfc6b0;
  --accent-4: #6b6964;
  --font-display: "Rakkas", cursive;
  --font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}

Use it with care

Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh Book Printing: The press also set the Qur'an (the 1924 Cairo edition) and hadith collections such as the Sultaniyya Sahih al-Bukhari, and Bulaq-style Naskh and Amiri are still used for Qur'anic and religious text, so never crop, mirror or distort Qur'anic verses or the names of God and the Prophet, use them as texture, or put them on floors, footwear or throwaway packaging. Set Arabic right to left with correct contextual shaping, have every word read by a fluent reader, never fill a layout with pseudo-Arabic, and never present a generated page as a historical Bulaq imprint.

Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type: Arabic is a living script and the script of the Qur'an, and simplified type was long resisted for books, government work and the Qur'an, so do not set Qur'anic verses, hadith or the names of God and the Prophet in reduced or detached forms, or use them as texture. Set Arabic right to left with correct joining, never pass off the disconnected letters of a software error as Unified Arabic, have every word read by a fluent reader, and do not present script reform as the correction of a deficient script: the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo rejected ASV Codar in 1958, and the type historian Titus Nemeth calls the survival of simplified forms in digital fonts a legacy of technical compromise that digital type no longer needs.

04

The two styles

Large black Arabic calligraphy reading “طلب العلم” is centered on a textured cream background. A black-and-muted-gold rectangular border, small corner flowers, and symmetrical floral flourishes above and below frame the lettering. 1822–1956 · Middle East & North Africa Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh Book Printing The page of the Arabic printed book as Egypt's state press at Bulaq shaped it from 1822: justified blocks of black Naskh type on pale paper, often boxed in a ruled frame, with an ornamental headpiece on the opening page, headings set larger or in a second script such as Nastaʿlīq, and almost no pictures. It printed army manuals, laws, textbooks, translated science, the Arabic classics and the official gazette. Calligraphers drew its later types, Mirza Sanglakh and then Muhammad Jaʿfar, whose 1905–06 body type was the basis of the 1924 Qur'an and lives on as Khaled Hosny's Amiri. 1947–present · Middle East & North Africa Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type Arabic redrawn for the machine rather than the reed pen. From 1947 reformers cut down the four positional forms of each letter: Nasri Khattar's Unified Arabic gave every letter one shape, set apart like Latin type in its detached print form, and Linotype's Simplified Arabic (1959, made with Beirut's al-Hayat) mostly two, so a newspaper fount fitted one 90-channel magazine; ASV Codar in Morocco gave the vowels letters of their own. Flat-based, even and with few ligatures, it became the common face of Arab newspapers and lives on in Windows system fonts.

05

More combinations

With Bulaq Naskh Book Printing

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