Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type

• Cut each letter's positional forms to what one keyboard and magazine can hold: two shapes where readers accept it, one in Unified Arabic, and keep extra forms only where reducing them would distort a familiar letter.
• Where letters join, run every join along a single straight baseline, trimming curves, stacked ligatures and vertical shifts so that letter groups fuse evenly even on absorbent newsprint. In Unified Arabic's print form, set each letter detached on that baseline, one shape per letter with few exceptions, as Latin print sets its letters.
• Draw the letters sharper, more linear and more even than the calligraphic Naskh founts and, as Khattar did, keep ascenders and descenders short so that no vertical space is wasted.
• Set the reduced type in dense black newspaper columns on pale paper, leaving size, bold weight and hand-lettered headlines to carry the hierarchy.
• Keep the alphabet fit for the whole machine chain, typewriter, linecaster, paper tape, phototypesetter and computer code, as ASV Codar set out to do and as Simplified Arabic proved in passing largely unchanged from hot metal to photocomposition and digital fonts.

Beirut, London and Rabat: the Lebanese architect Nasri Khattar's Unified Arabic (US design patent filed 1947); Simplified Arabic, made in London by Linotype & Machinery from 1954 at the request of Kamel Mrowa, owner of the Beirut daily al-Hayat, with letterforms revised and later redrawn by its staff calligrapher Nabih Jaroudi; and Ahmed Lakhdar-Ghazal's ASV Codar (French patent 1954), taken up for Morocco's literacy campaign and developed at the Institute for Studies and Research on Arabization in Rabat (1960)

1. Titus Nemeth, 'Simplified Arabic: a new form of Arabic type for hot metal composition', Typography Papers 9 (2013), pp. 173–189 (https://typography.network/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Nemeth_TypPp_9_Simplified_Arabic_a_new_form_of_Arabic_type_for_hot_metal_composition.pdf)
2. Titus Nemeth, Arabic Type-Making in the Machine Age: The Influence of Technology on the Form of Arabic Type, 1908–1993 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 109–129, the reference for Wikipedia's history of ASV Codar
3. Wikipedia, 'Simplified Arabic' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Arabic)
4. Wikipedia, 'ASV Codar' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASV_Codar)
5. Wikipedia, 'Nasri Khattar' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasri_Khattar)
6. Wikipedia, 'Institute for Studies and Research on Arabization' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Studies_and_Research_on_Arabization)
7. Pascal Zoghbi, 'Nasri Khattar's Typographic Journey', 29LT blog, 26 January 2013 (https://blog.29lt.com/2013/01/26/nasri-khattars-typographic-journey/)
8. Pascal Zoghbi, '29LT UA Neo: A Detached Arabic Type System', 29LT blog, 29 July 2013 (https://blog.29lt.com/2013/07/29/ua-neo-fonts/)
9. Yara Khoury Nammour, 'Fighting Illiteracy With Typography', Works That Work 6, on Unified Arabic's detached letters and their Latin-like forms and proportions (https://worksthatwork.com/6/unified-arabic)
10. Khatt Books, Yara Khoury Nammour, Nasri Khattar: A Modernist Typotect (Amsterdam, 2014), publisher's page (https://www.khattbooks.com/nasri-khattar)
11. Ahmed Lakhdar-Ghazal, 'Maroc: L'Institut d'études et de recherches pour l'arabisation', Terminologies nouvelles 4 (RIFAL), on the ASV-Codar system for hot and cold composition, typewriters, word processing, computing and data transmission (https://termisti.ulb.ac.be/archive/rifal/PDF/tn04/tn04_Lakhdar-Ghazal.pdf)
12. Microsoft Learn, 'Simplified Arabic Fixed font family' (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/simplified-arabic)
13. MyFonts, 'ASV Codar LT' (Linotype) (https://www.myfonts.com/collections/asv-codar-lt-font-linotype)
14. Wikimedia Commons, 'A7 Imintanoute.JPG' (Brio-En, 2016, CC BY-SA 4.0): ASV Codar on a Moroccan motorway sign (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A7_Imintanoute.JPG)

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