Style combination · Contrasts

Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type × Urdu Katib Lithography

Urdu made the opposite choice, keeping the katib's hand because metal type could not carry Nastaʿlīq; set side by side they show economy against calligraphic fidelity.

From the research on Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type

Mix them and make something Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type Urdu Katib Lithography

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type, their arrangement from Urdu Katib Lithography, the finish from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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.

Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type Urdu Katib Lithography

Type from Urdu Katib Lithography: Brush & pen calligraphy
Hand-lettering
Colour from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type: Monochrome
Light ground
Form from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type: Rectilinear
Ornament-free
Composition from Urdu Katib Lithography: Column grid
Horror vacui
Surface from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type: Paper & letterpress bite
Flat

The type

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

Display · Urdu Katib Lithography

Public

Rakkas, standing in for Lahori Nastaʿlīq (katib hand)

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

The colours

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

Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type Urdu Katib Lithography

#f7f7f5 ground · 36%
#141414 ink · 14%
#1d4f9e accent · 18%
#a32a2a accent · 14%
#cfc6b0 accent · 10%
#6b6964 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f7f7f5;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #1d4f9e;
  --accent-2: #a32a2a;
  --accent-3: #cfc6b0;
  --accent-4: #6b6964;
  --font-display: "Rakkas", cursive;
  --font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}

Use it with care

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.

Urdu Katib Lithography: Urdu pages often carry Qur'anic phrases, the names of God and the Prophet and religious verse; never use Nastaʿlīq as meaningless texture or set invented text that imitates it, and have every word read by a fluent Urdu reader. Katibs were rarely credited; name the calligrapher where known, and commission a working khushnawees rather than tracing archival pages.

The two styles

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. 1837–present · South Asia Urdu Katib Lithography For about a century and a half Urdu chose lithography over movable type, because metal type could not reproduce the sloping, stacked ligatures of Nastaʿlīq. Teams of katibs wrote whole newspapers, books and advertisements by hand on transfer paper, nesting each cascading word into dense, hand-ruled columns under enlarged calligraphic headlines. Noori Nastaliq (1981), digitised from Ahmed Mirza Jamil's hand, carried the katib's letterforms into computer composition.