Computers in Human Behavior 39 (2014) 177–186

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Computers in Human Behavior

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A calligraphic based scheme to justify Arabic text improving readability

and comprehension
Aqil M. Azmi a,⇑, Abeer Alsaiari b
a
Department of Computer Science, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
b
Department of Computer Science, Taiba University, Madina, Saudi Arabia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Studies have shown a correlation between reading comprehension and the visual appearance of the
displayed text. One of the factors that affect the visual look of a text is its alignment. The purpose of this
paper is to develop and implement a sophisticated algorithm to output a properly justified Arabic text.
Keywords: Most of the tools geared for e-document have not been tailored with Arabic in mind. And so, these either
Arabic typography violate several calligraphic rules, or are a far cry from the aesthetics developed by the centuries old tra-
Font dition of Arabic calligraphy. The scheme we developed is more realistic calligraphically and more pleas-
Kashida
ing aesthetically. It is a two-step process. Lines are populated with whole words, afterwards we use
Text justification
Readability
alternate form of the letters to compress or stretch the line as needed. In the second step we use kashida
Comprehension (elongation of the connecting line between the letters) to fill in the remaining gaps. There are strict rules
which dictate which, when, and the minimum/maximum length of the kashida a word can have. We
tested our justified Arabic text on university students. The experiment revealed the participants were
able to read faster and had a better comprehension when presented with our justified text. The scheme
we devised could be extended to other languages which share the basic Arabic script, e.g. Persian, and
Urdu.
Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Typography (from the Greek words typos impression, and
graphia graphy) is the art and technique of arranging type to make
the language visible. This arrangement involves the selection of
typefaces, point size, width of the line, the spacing between lines
(interline spacing), spacing between groups of letters, the spacing
between pairs of letters (kerning), and text justification. The typog-
raphy of texts is of interest for two main reasons. First, the typog-
raphy should not interfere with the reader’s ability to understand
the text; and second, the visual appearance of the text may influ-
ence the motivation to read. Just imagine reading this paper in cur-
sive script. There are many studies in the English language that
have reported a strong link between reading rate, accuracy, and
comprehension (Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp, & Jenkins, 2001; Tan &
Nicholson, 1997).
Early studies examined typography readability for printed mat-
ters, with later studies tackling the e-texts or computer displays.
The majority of the studies were for English typographies, e.g.
⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +966 011 467 6574.
E-mail addresses: aqil@ksu.edu.sa (A.M. Azmi), abeer_alsaiari@yahoo.com
(A. Alsaiari).
(Bernard, Lida, Riley, Hackler, & Janzen, 2002). The studies have
shown that certain typographical parameters such as typeface,
margins and spacing do affect the readability of online text
(Dyson, 2004). Campbell, Marchetti, and Mewhort (1981) com-
pared the reading speed of 156 participants for right justified Eng-
lish text using three different techniques: no justification, right
justified using fixed character spacing, and right justified using var-
iable character spacing. Of these, the authors reported an improved
reading speed for variable-spacing right justified text. However,
these guidelines are for English text and they are not applicable
to Arabic script due to orthographic differences (Ganayim &
Ibrahim, 2013).
The Arabic language is home to over three hundred million peo-
ple. The Arabic script is more widely used, with over a billion and
half Muslims who read the Qur’an in its original Arabic script. And
just as most of the European languages uses Roman based alpha-
bet, so is the case with languages such as Persian, Urdu, Ottoman
(Old Turkish) . . . etc. all of these use Arabic based alphabet. There
are 28 basic letters in the Arabic script which includes 3 long vow-
els. Most of the letters in Arabic assume four different forms
depending on the context: initial, middle, final and isolated. In
addition there are short vowels (a, i, u), more commonly known
as diacritical markings, a total combination of 13. These markings,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.07.003
0747-5632/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
178 A.M. Azmi, A. Alsaiari / Computers in Human Behavior 39 (2014) 177–186
which are placed either above or below the letter, are used to clar-
ify the sense and meaning of the word. For example, the Arabic
word for flag, science, or taught is (‫)ﻋﻠﻢ‬. There are two ways to
disambiguate, use diacritical markings, or through the context.
The former is a fool proof scheme, however, it is absent in modern
writing. This leaves us with the context, which the natives are flu-
ent at. Though there remain cases where either interpretation is
plausible (Azmi & Almajed, 2013). Consider the standalone exam-
ple, (‫ )ﺃﻛﻠﺖ ﺍﻟﺨﺒﺰ‬which could either mean I ate the bread, you ate the
bread (masculine), you ate the bread (feminine), or the bread was ea-
ten. Clearly this is an important reason why most religious books
are full of diacritical markings. The books for those learning Arabic
as a second language are also dotted with diacritical markings.
Few studies have examined the typography of Arabic texts
(Abubaker & Lu, 2012; Alsumait & Al-Osaimi, 2009; Ganayim &
Ibrahim, 2013; Hemayssi, Sanchez, Moll, & Field, 2006; Ramadan,
2011). Ramadan (2011) presented a study evaluating college stu-
dents’ readability and comprehension of Arabic e-books. In a series
of three experiments involving 49, 31, and 31 participants, where
in the first experiment the participants were asked to rate some
good Arabic fonts from those found in MS Windows system for
reading e-passages. In the second experiment, the participants
determined the best font style and font size out of those rated in
the first experiment, while in the final experiment they determined
the best combination of page layout and background/text color
arrangement. The result revealed that Simplified Arabic font, with
a point size of 14pt were the best combination between different
Arabic font styles and sizes. Also, a single column text with
black/white background color was the best combination for the
third experiment. Interestingly, this elaborate study overlooked
two important factors: text justification, and the diacritical mark-
ings; which are likely to influence the readability and the compre-
hension of the Arabic text. Abubaker and Lu (2012) experimented
for the optimum font size and type to read from screen for students
aged 10–12. The study involved two fonts (Traditional Arabic, and
Simplified Arabic) at four different sizes, 10, 14, 16 and 18pts. A to-
tal of 30 students (10 per age group) participated in the study. The
authors concluded that font size 16pt and below are inappropriate
for children age 10, however, font sizes 14 and 16 are readable for
those aged 12 and over. They also recommended avoiding Tradi-
tional Arabic for this age group. The study in Ganayim and
Ibrahim (2013) involved 210 native Arab students. The authors
found that multicolumn text affected the comprehension achieve-
ment but not the reading speed. The students reported a better
comprehension for single-column text than for the multicolumn.
For designing Arabic text, a reading rate of 127 words/min is to
be considered. In the same study it was reported that the interline
spacing had no relevance on either factor. As we mentioned, there
are many facets to typography. Elements such as selection of type-
face, point size, and various spacing are fine-tuned by individual
typesetters depending on the aesthetics or subject to some cultural
conventions. For example, in Arabic and French it is customary to
leave a space before a colon or semicolon in a sentence, while in
English it is not. Text justification is one element of typography
which can be automated; the other is hyphenation, something
which is inappropriate for Arabic script. To the best of the authors’
knowledge, there is no study on the readability and comprehen-
sion of justified Arabic text. We therefore assume the study in
Campbell et al. (1981) for the English justified text holding true
for Arabic. Having said so, we in this paper develop a sophisticated
system to justify Arabic text. A system which takes into account all
the peculiarities of the Arabic script and at the same time conforms
to the traditional Arabic calligraphy. With the help of 44 partici-
pants, all university students, we evaluate our Arabic text justifica-
tion system using the font we developed for this purpose against
14 point Simplified Arabic font, the best combination according
Fig. 1. The four letter name ‘Muhammad’ at different degrees of stretching (left) or
compressing (right).
to the study in Ramadan (2011). Another study which backed this
font, albeit for young children, is (Abubaker & Lu, 2012). For our
experiment we used plain text as well as text with full diacritical
markings. The assessment revealed that our font using a sophisti-
cated text justification algorithm beats Simplified Arabic font in
both readability and comprehension tests.
The process of typesetting languages using the Arabic script is
more challenging than typesetting using the Roman script because
of the requirement for special needs and strict rules. Standard soft-
ware on different platforms provide appropriate tools to handle
Arabic and other right-to-left languages, but leaves much to be de-
sired in terms of quality. The flow of traditional calligraphy is said
to be lost in moveable-type printing and most likely in plain com-
puter typesetting (Andrew, 2008). According to Mulder (2007), the
Ottomans did not use printing with moveable type until long after
it was in use elsewhere, mostly because of reluctance to compro-
mise the elegance of the text. During the last century there were
calls to ‘simplify’ the Arabic writing system, e.g. one form per letter
and even allowing for left-to-right ordering (Széll, 2012). These
calls faded as new generation of smart fonts came into existence
which makes it possible to mimic some of the features that one de-
sires from a calligraphic point of view (Azmi & Alsaiari, 2009; Széll,
2012). Though Arabic typography got much better in the last two
decades, yet, there are still some aspects that need to be addressed
so that the quality of Arabic typography can match as closely to the
quality of its calligraphy. When justifying a Latin based text, the
software rely on: (1) hyphenation; and (2) insertion of extra spaces
between words. On the other hand, the Arabic based typesetting
software stretches the words horizontally using kashida (‫)ﻛﺸﻴﺪﺓ‬.
Such a solution violates a basic principle of Arabic calligraphy
where certain letters can be stretched while others can be com-
pressed (Benatia, Elyaakoubi, & Lazrek, 2006), see Fig. 1. These
set of rules as defined by the calligraphers have been maintained
ever since and we would like to keep them intact into the digital
age. So in developing our Arabic text justification system we aim
to develop one that conforms to the rules as put forth by the
calligraphers.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. In the next section
we look into the characteristics of Arabic writing. We cover related
works in Section 3. In Section 4 we go over our proposed scheme.
And in Section 5 we look into our implementation and how it com-
pares to output by other software. Section 6 covers the evaluation
of our text justification system. Finally we conclude and suggest
some future works in Section 7.
2. Characteristics of Arabic writing
As a language, Arabic predates Islam (Al-Azami, 2011, pp.
123–129). However, it was Islam that boasted it and gave it emi-
nence because Qur’an was revealed in it. During the early period
of Islam there were no mandatory rules for Arabic script. The draw-
ing of letters did not follow any particular style or specific rules.
Since Islam prohibits the depiction of human form (aniconism),
this lead to Islamic art being dominated by decorative geometric
patterns, and calligraphy. The latter was specially revered in Isla-
mic arts as it was the primary mean for the preservation of the
Qur’an. While the art of calligraphy has often been dominated by
men, there were famous women calligraphers who are known to
scribe the whole of Qur’an (Al-Munajjid, 1995; Kazan, 2010;
 A.M. Azmi, A. Alsaiari / Computers in Human Behavior 39 (2014) 177–186 179

Simonowitz, 2010). Among the most notable master calligraphers

are Ibn Muqla (d. 940), and Yaqut Al-Musta’simi (d. 1298). It is be-
lieved that the Arabic script reached its zenith through the hands
of Al-Musta’simi; and as thus, the Arabic writing became distin-
guishable with a group of features and rules that we would have
to take into account in order to produce an acceptable text from
the point of view of Arabic calligrapher (Elyaakoubi & Lazrek,
2005). There are a number of characteristics and rules of Arabic
script. A good awareness of these characteristics leads to profes-
sional design of Arabic type. We will briefly go over some of them.

2.1. Cursivity
Fig. 3. Ligatures in Arabic can appear in various degrees.
Unlike Latin based writing which is made up of independent
characters, Arabic only allows cursive style. This cursivity implies
up four different forms for the same letter, see Fig. 2. A form is
selected based on the context.

2.2. Ligatures

Due to the cursive nature of writing, Arabic script is extremely

rich in ligatures. Some of the ligatures are mandatory while others
are optional and exist only for aesthetic reasons, legibility or justi-
fication (Lazrek, 2007). The ligatures can appear in various degrees,
see Fig. 3.

2.3. Diacritic dot

Fig. 4. Using dots as a measurement unit for the letter alif.
Diacritic dots are a measurement unit marked by the feather of
the used calligraphy pen (Benatia et al., 2006; Elyaakoubi & Lazrek,
2005). The semantic role of diacritic dots is that certain letters are
characterized by the presence, number and the positions of these
dots. For example the three different letters: ‫ ﺕ ;ﺏ‬and ‫ ﺙ‬all share
the same basic glyph. The diacritic dot is also used by calligraphers
as a measurement unit to regularize the dimensions and the met-
rics of glyphs, Fig. 4.

2.4. Diacritic signs

Fig. 5. The same word ktb with different diacritic signs (colored in red). (For
Diacritic signs (or short vowels) are markings added above or interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred
to the web version of this article.)
below the letters to aid in proper pronunciation of the purely
consonantal text (Fig. 5). The diacritic signs take different heights,
not only with respect to basic glyphs but also according to other
contextual elements.

2.5. Allograph
These are different graphical form a letter can have while keep-
ing its place, i.e. initial, middle, final and isolated. Its form is depen-
dent on the neighboring letters and the presence of kashida. For
example, the initial form of the letter ba can take three different
allograph shapes (Fig. 6) according to its left neighboring letter
(Benatia et al., 2006).
Fig. 2. The four different forms of the Arabic letter ba. The forms are selected
according to the context.
Fig. 6. Three different allographic shapes of the initial letter ba. The diacritic dots
are used to specify the height.
2.6. Kashida
Kashida is a connection between Arabic letters and it is not a
separate character but a curvilinear connection with the previous
letter. It is primarily used for: emphasis, legibility, aesthetic and
justification (Berry, 1999). As with ligatures, the kashida comes
in various degrees (stretches), see Fig. 1. The stretching of a letter
is not haphazard, but rather follows a set of strict rules which de-
fines the priorities and degrees of which a letter can be extended.
These set of rules are stored in what is known as kashida elonga-
tion matrix (Table 1) (Benatia et al., 2006). For example, if the letter
[‫ ]ﺏ‬is followed by the letter [‫ ]ﻁ‬then it can be stretched by a single
diacritic dot (Section 2.3) and up to 12 diacritical dots, which is the
180 A.M. Azmi, A. Alsaiari / Computers in Human Behavior 39 (2014) 177–186

Table 1
The kashida elongation matrix or the degrees of extensions. The ‘+’ indicates elongation (stretching) is highly recommended, ‘
’ indicates elongation are allowed but discouraged,
while the unsigned number means elongation are allowed. Blank entries means elongation is prohibited. To reduce the size of the table, letters are grouped into classes. Letters
inside [ ] means the class of the characters that share the same skeleton, e.g. [‫ ]ﺏ‬stand for the letters: ‫ ﺏ‬،‫ ﺕ‬،‫ﺙ‬.

Previous letter Current letter

‫ﺃ‬ [‫]ﺏ‬ [‫]ﺝ‬ [‫]ﺩ‬ [‫]ﺭ‬ [‫]ﺱ‬ [‫]ﺹ‬ [‫]ﻁ‬ [‫]ﻉ‬ ‫ﻑ‬ ‫ﻕ‬ ‫ﻙ‬ ‫ﻝ‬ ‫ﻡ‬ ‫ﻥ‬ ‫ﻫـ‬ ‫ﻭ‬
[‫]ﺏ‬ 5 1
1
1
1 +1
1 1 1 1
[‫]ﺝ‬
1
1
1
1 +1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
[‫]ﺱ[]ﺹ[]ﻁ‬ 3 1 2
1
1 1 2 2 1
1
1
1 2 2
1 2
1
1
[‫]ﻉ‬
1
1
1
1 +1
1
1
1
1
1
‫ﻑﻕ‬ 1 1
1
1
1 +1
1
1
1
1
‫ﻙ‬ 3
1
1 1 1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
‫ﻝ‬ 3
1
1
1
1
1
1
‫ﻡ‬
1
1 1 1 1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
‫ﻫـ‬ 1
1
1
1
1

limit any letter can be stretched by. If on the other hand we have
[‫ ]ﺏ‬followed by the letter [‫ ]ﺱ‬then stretching is not allowed. In
proper Arabic calligraphy, the kashida must resemble a curvilinear
segment between letters. Using a simple straight line segment for a
kashida is esthetically unacceptable.
3. Related work
There are few works that cover Arabic typography specifically
from the implementation point of view. Most of what we have seen
is work on issues and problems with Arabic typography.
The original TeX (Knuth, 1986) paragraphing algorithm worked
at the paragraph level rather than lines. The idea was to model
each paragraph as a graph of vertices. The first node of the graph
is located at the beginning of the paragraph. Then, it locates the
second node at the point that gives an appropriate width of line,
by computing glyphs widths starting from the first node. The first
node may connect to more than one node because the spaces be-
tween words varied and there are more than one case to break
the line. Each arrow between two vertices has a badness value
associated with it. The badness value is simply the difference be-
tween the actual length of the line and the ideal length. The new
nodes are activated to be the starting point to search for new
nodes. At the end, the paragraph is justified by following the short-
est way in the graph. Initially, TeX was released for Roman based
languages only. Later, Knuth and MacKay (1987) presented a work-
ing solution for including right-to-left text (for Arabic and Hebrew)
in the TeX family. Their proposed TeX–XeT system is an extension
of TeX. Within the TeX extensions, both Omega and ArabTeX
(Lagally, 1992) have been used for Arabic and have managed to
meet some of the basic requirements. ArabTeX had to compromise
on the issue of text justification. In practice for right-to-left text,
ArabTeX handled line breaking itself, bypassing the original TeX’s
working approach that was used for the Latin script (Sherif &
Fahmy, 2007).
Haralambous (2006) presented an infrastructure for typesetting
in Arabic script. This infrastructure is based on four tools: the con-
cept of texteme, OpenType fonts, Omega2 modules and an ex-
tended version of TeX’s line-breaking graph. Texteme is an
atomic unit of text consisting of key-value pairs such as Unicode
position. Out of this infrastructure the author created extended
TeX graph. Applying the functionality of this infrastructure at each
step of Arabic text processing will create an Arabic texteme con-
taining all the information accumulated through the Arabic text
processing steps, as well as the initial information: Unicode char-
acters, contextual forms, etc. The author claims that using ex-
tended TeX graph along with texteme will prove useful for the
Arabic script, however, it was not clear how it will be applicable
for proper text justification other than ligature substitution.
AlQalam (Fahmy, 2006) evolved as an upgrade to ArabTeX.
Hence, it inherits ArabTeX’s good features. It was mainly intended
for typesetting the Qur’an and traditional texts using the Arabic
script. Sherif and Fahmy (2007) presented ‘parameterized Arabic
font’ for AlQalam system, which they claim is a better way for
working out with Arabic script. To achieve an output quality close
to that of Arabic calligraphers, they tried to model the pen nib and
the way it is used to draw curves as closely to the ideal as possible
using METAFONT. Parameterized fonts were also introduced for a
more flexible and dynamic combination of glyphs, to be used in
forming ligatures and in drawing whole words as single entities.
Ditroff/ffortid is a system for formatting bi-directional text in
Arabic, Hebrew and Persian (Berry, 1999). The system is able to for-
mat mixed left-to-right and right-to-left texts using fonts with iso-
lated letters or with connecting letters and only connection
stretching, achieved by repeating straight fixed-length baseline
fillers.
There are many Arabic word processors on different platforms.
These word processors were originally built for Latin then they
were adapted to handle Arabic script according to the system envi-
ronment. Microsoft Word supports Arabic. The justification of Ara-
bic text in Word is based on a combination of words pacing
variation and kashida. Word places the kashida according to a pri-
ority scheme that indicates where kashida is to be placed automat-
ically. Usually once only between two letters in a word. It
determines the highest priority character in the word to be
stretched using the kashida. In case two letters have the same pri-
ority, then the kashida is placed towards the end of the word
(Smitshuijzen, 2007). In fact, an option within Word allows it to
justify Arabic text using only word spacing, similar to what it does
in Latin. Another notable software is Adobe ME. The way kashidas
are put between the text seems to be mysterious or random in the
Adobe ME software. There could be some logic behind it but it is
not obvious (Smitshuijzen, 2007).
4. Our proposed scheme
The development of Arabic document processing tools must be
formalized to the Arabic handwriting rules. Owing to the imposed
rules, Arabic script does not enjoy the same luxury that the Latin
script does when it comes to automated typesetting on the com-
puters. The cursivity of the Arabic script means hyphenation is
unacceptable (Elyaakoubi & Lazrek, 2005). The Arab calligraphers
treat the composition of text in a specific way where certain letters
can be stretched while others can be compressed. To justify a line,
the calligraphers compose some ligatures to get a narrower text, or
decompose some ligatures and extend certain letters to get a wider
text. This process occurs according to the available space in the
line. Forming ligatures is clear in words as ‫ ﺑﺤﺮ‬becoming to
 A.M. Azmi, A. Alsaiari / Computers in Human Behavior 39 (2014) 177–186
shrink the word if there is a lack of available space in the line.
Stretching letter is apparent in the first letter of the word
‫ ﻗـــــﻄﺎﺭ‬to get a more elongated word. According to the Arabic
calligraphy rules, the stretching of letters follows the letter itself
and the preceding letter. Both of the operations, compression and
stretching can be done in various degrees. The rules are summa-
rized in Table 1 which is known as the Kashida elongation matrix.
Our proposed text justification scheme is a two level process. At
first we substitute the composed ligatures with alternative forms
of less/more width according to the available space. Second, we
repeatedly apply the kashida according to the kashida elongation
matrix till the lines reach the appropriate width. Most of the avail-
able Arabic fonts support limited ligatures and that means they are
poorly suitable for our proposed algorithm. So before implement-
ing the algorithm we need to prepare an appropriate font. Design-
ing a font from scratch is time consuming process and requires a
professional design artist. We decided to pick an existing font
and edit it by introducing some new ligatures. In this section we
will start with our font development and later move to the
algorithm.
4.1. Font enhancement
Font development is a fairly cumbersome task. So rather than
developing a font from scrape we decided to pick one of the avail-
able fonts. We picked an early version of a highly acclaimed Arabic
Typesetting Font (ATF). This OpenType font is based on Naskh writ-
ing style and was developed by M. Sakkal for Microsoft Corporation
along with the assistance of P. Nelson and J. Hudson. The font dif-
fers slightly from the official version which was distributed with
Microsoft Office 2007. This prelease version of the font comes with
all the OpenType tables, which is not the case with the official
release.
The font contains over 2100 glyphs, including contextual alter-
nates, ligatures, and language specific forms. Great care and consis-
tency has been applied in glyphs used for many other languages,
e.g. Persian, Urdu . . . that uses a variant of basic Arabic script. In
the development phase we reviewed all the existing ligatures
and then added some new ligatures and glyphs. We noticed that
most of the ligatures in ATF font are confined to isolated and initial
forms and few of final forms. Some of these ligatures are able to
accept the medial forms. The importance of the medial form of
the ligature are due to its ability to shorten the word (make it less
horizontal) in case of dynamic justification. Fig. 7 shows some of
the new ligatures which we added into the ATF font. Our aim is
to achieve high quality Arabic typography. This is realized by the
presence of aesthetic ligatures as well as applying the calligraphic
rules in justifying text. Since streching the letters with different
elongations is part of justification process, we added to the ATF
font a number of kashidas with different elongations to use them
later when justifying the text.
Following the introduction of new ligatures into ATF, we need
to inform the font when to compose these ligatures. This facility
is available through the OpenType feature glyph substitution. For
this we used VOLT, a free tool by Microsoft. VOLT (Visual OpenType
Layout Tool) (www.microsoft.com/typography/volt.mspx) allows
for visual composition. For example, if we have the glyph uniFD8A
and is followed by the glyph uniFEAA then these two glyphs are
substituted by a single glyph glyph2940. By this way we determine
when to compose each one of these ligatures. The font is now ready
for use once it is compiled.
4.2. Our algorithm
We consider a document in a word processor as simply a set of
paragraphs, with each paragraph ending with a newline character.
181
The algorithm greedily puts as many words on a line as possible. To
justify a line, the algorithm computes its badness value which is
the value resulting from subtracting the width of the current line
from the specific total width (which is the maximum width of a
line). The badness value is always positive because the program
will not allow reading a line larger than the specific total width.
After computing the badness value, the algorithm starts its justify-
ing process until the badness value becomes zero, actually when
badness falls below a certain threshold we treat it as zero. The pro-
cess of justification is a two-step procedure: substitution step and
kashida step.
4.2.1. Substitution step
After the badness is computed, the algorithm starts looking for
any character that has an alternative glyph of a wider width. It only
considers the alternative glyphs that have a width equal or less
than the badness value. From all the alternative glyphs that have
been found, it picks the one with the largest width. This ensures
we minimize the search for alternative glyphs that can fit the bad-
ness value. After determining the best alternative glyph, the algo-
rithm re-computes the badness value. The process of looking for
new glyph and replacement is continued till the badness value be-
comes zero or if there are no more appropriate alternative glyphs
that can fit the badness value. In the latter case, the algorithm pro-
ceeds to the next level, that is working with kashida.
4.2.2. Kashida step
In this step, the algorithm determines the best positions to in-
sert the kashida. The goal is to fill in the gaps and reduce the bad-
ness value to zero.
We set priorities as to which word(s) should have the kashida.
The shorter the word, the higher priority it has to have a kashida
(Table 2). Four letter words have the highest priority, followed by
those having five letters and so on. The priority for which words
should be stretched first follows the general calligraphic rule,
kashida appears more frequently in four letter words and less in
five letter words and even lesser in six letter words. Kashida is
not recommended for two of three letter words with some excep-
tions in cases such as: (‫ )ﺳﺮ‬and (‫ )ﺻﺮ‬for two letter words and (‫ )ﺑﺴﻢ‬a
three letter word.
Once we have determined which words should have the kash-
ida. Next we need to decide which characters(s) within the word
should be stretched. For this we need to consult the kashida elon-
gation matrix (Table 1). The entries with positive sign have the
highest priority (which we set as priority 3), this is followed by en-
tries with no sign (priority 2). The entries with negative sign have
the least priority, i.e. priority 1.
The process of determining the best position for kashida starts
by first looking for the word with the highest priority for having
the kashida. Then it looks for the character in this word that
has the highest priority to be stretched by the kashida, according
to the kashida elongation matrix. In case there are no appropriate
characters in the current word, we move to the next word with the
highest priority and so on. When the best position for kashida has
been determined according to the previous scenario, the algorithm
will take the badness value as a parameter and will insert the
kashida in the determined position. The elongation of the kashida
is determined by the badness value, but in no case it can exceed 12
times its entry in the kashida elongation matrix. After the kashida
is inserted, the badness value is recomputed. We continue looking
for next place to insert kashida until badness value becomes zero.
This process is repeated from the top of the document till its end.
Table 3 is the pseudo code of our justification algorithm. Fig. 8
illustrates our algorithm through an example.
182 A.M. Azmi, A. Alsaiari / Computers in Human Behavior 39 (2014) 177–186
Fig. 7. Some of the new ligatures that were added into the ATF font.
Table 2
Priority levels of words for having a kashida.
Word length Priority
Four letters 4
Five letters 3
Six letters 2 placed kashida correctly in the first four letter word in the line
Seven letters 1 (Fig. 10b). At the fourth line (Fig. 10a) we note that Word used
5. Implementation
The algorithm cannot work by itself but it has to be integrated
with a word processor or text editor software. The editing software
will do the typical task, and our algorithm will be called to justify
the text before being rendered for screen output. For our imple-
mentation we used ‘neatpad’ (www.catch22.net/tuts/neatpad), an
open source text editor that supports Arabic.
Any software that renders text will be composed of three basic
components: the text editor, the font engine, and the font typeface
(Fig. 9). In (1), the system intercepts the stream of keyboard char-
acter codes sending them to the font engine; these character codes
are translated into a stream of glyphs through the font’s tables (2);
the glyphs are returned back to the editor (3) for rendering on the
screen, and on their way to the editor the justification algorithm
kicks in (4). The justification of the text is based on measuring
the width of the glyph before rendering them on the screen. Since
the algorithm is implemented in the middle between the font en-
gine and the application when the stream of glyphs is returned,
this translates to a line wise justification of text. This means our
algorithm justifies text at the line level rather than at a paragraph
level. The algorithm was implemented using Visual C++ v6.0.
Next we go over some sample output of our algorithm. For com-
parison purposes, each sample will be rendered by the standard
built-in justification in Microsoft Word and our justification algo-
rithm. The first sample (Fig. 10) is for a plain text, while the other
one (Fig. 11) is for a full vocalized text (diacritical marking).
In Fig. 10a we note that MS Word had an under-filled top line.
At times, Word resort to extra space for justification. This is against
the established rules. We marked these extra spaces with blue
vertical lines as seen in the second, third and the sixth lines. The
short red horizontal lines mark the incorrect places Word used
kashida. For example, at the end of the second line there a kashida
after the letter noon which is followed by the letter ta’. This is a five
letter word. According to the rules, the preference is given for four
letter word over longer ones for having kashida. Our algorithm
kashida at several places incorrectly. Fig. 11 shows the justification
of fully diacritized text. Again we note the many places Word put
kashida at the wrong place. Some more samples of justified text
using the algorithm are in Fig. 12.
6. Evaluation of our system
The purpose of this experiment was to evaluate our Arabic text
justification algorithm, a system which closely follows the rules set
by master calligraphers. As we are dealing with e-text, so it is wise
to compare our justification system with the one used in Microsoft
Word. For the experiment we prepared four different sample pas-
sages of comparable sizes, each approximately 170 words long.
These were divided into two sets. In the first set we have two pas-
sages written in ATF font, with the text being justified using our
algorithm. The ATF font was developed as part of our justification
algorithm as it contains many glyphs that are necessary for the
proper working of the algorithm (see Section 4). And in the other
set we have two passages that are written in Simplified Arabic Font
(SAF), and justified using the standard algorithm in MS Word.
According to the studies (Abubaker & Lu, 2012; Ramadan, 2011),
the SAF font achieved better results for e-text readability and com-
prehension. In each set we have one passage that is plain (no dia-
critical markings), and the other one with full diacritical markings.
Following the studies in Ganayim and Ibrahim (2013) and
Ramadan (2011) all the texts were formatted in single column.
The objective of the experiment is to determine the performance
of our justification algorithm in both passages, plain and fully
diacritized, in terms of reading speed, and reading comprehension.
We have two Arabic font styles, ATF and SAF, along with two
types of texts, diacritic and non-diacritic (plain) text. These are
considered the main independent variables in our experiment to
 A.M. Azmi, A. Alsaiari / Computers in Human Behavior 39 (2014) 177–186 183

Table 3
Pseudocode of our text justification algorithm. This algorithm justifies each line
separately.

Input: a single line of text T

badness_value maximum line width
current width of text T
// substitution step
while (badness_value > 0 AND curr_character – end_of_line) do
if (we have alternative glyph for curr_character) then
D width of current alternative
width of curr_character
if (D 6 badness_value) then
replace curr_character by its alternative form
update badness_value
end if
get next character
end if
end while
// kashida step
if (badness_value – 0) then
for word_level_priority = 4    1 do
curr_word first word in T
while (curr_word – end_of_line AND badness_value > 0) do
if (priority of curr_word = word_level_priority) then
for char_level_priority = 3    1 do
curr_character next char in curr_word with
priority = char_leveLpriority
if (exist such a character) then
kashida_length min(12 * size of diacritical dot, badness_value)
add kashida after curr_character
update badness_value
end if
end for
end if
get next word
end while
end for
end if

determine the performance with regard to participant’s reading

speed and comprehension. Participant’s reading speed and reading
comprehension are the two dependent measures collected in this
experiment to evaluate their performance. The two measures were
calculated as follows: (1) reading speed was calculated by dividing
the total number of words in each passage by the total elapsed
time in reading it, expressed in words/min; and (2) reading com- Fig. 8. An example illustrating our two step justification algorithm: (a) the original
text, (b) after substitution step, and (c) after kashida step.
prehension level was measured to reflect how well the subject
understood the text material and was measured by dividing the to-
package GraphPad Prism 6 (www.graphpad.com) to test the depen-
tal number of correct answers by the total number of questions in
dent measures. As the same subject in our experiment received four
each treatment, expressed as percent of correct answers.
treatments, we performed repeated measures 2-way ANOVA to test
For the experiment we developed an application which asks the
three hypotheses, the hypothesis of the main effect of font type (ATF
subject to enter their name, this is followed by an opening screen
vs SAF), text status (plain vs diacritical marked text), and their
with instructions, and four buttons each marking a treatment. In
interaction on subject’s performance in terms of reading speed
each treatment the subject is presented with a passage to read, fol-
and reading comprehension.
lowed by some questions on the passage. The subject reads the
passage at their own pace, and once read, they are presented with
four true/false questions related to the passage read. This is used to 6.1. Reading speed
reflect how well the subject comprehended what they read. There
is no time limit for answering the question. The subject moves to Font type effect was significant at p-value <0.0001, F(1, 43)
the next treatment once they are done answering the previous’ = 43.04. Text status and the interaction of font type by text status
questions. An internal clock keeps track of the exact time the sub- were not significant. The text status was not significant, F(1, 43)
ject required to read the passage in each treatment. At the end, the = 3.11 at p-value = 0.085. Also, the interaction of font type by text
system saves the data for each subject. The data includes the sub- status was not significant, F(1, 43) = 1.09 at p-value = 0.302 which
ject’s name, time to read each the passage, and the number of cor- is greater than our confidence interval of 0.05. As shown in Table 4,
rect answers in each treatment. The passages in the treatment and Fig. 13, participants read significantly faster at plain text in ATF
were as follows. In the first treatment the passage is in ATF font font by a mean of 164 words/min. And in general, they read faster
with diacritical marked text; in the second treatment it is in ATF in ATF font for both kinds of text (plain and diacritical marked text)
font with plain text; for the third treatment it is in SAF font with when compared to SAF font.
diacritical marked text; and in the last treatment it is in SAF font
with plain text. 6.2. Reading comprehension
A total of 44 participants took part in the study. All of them native
Arabic speakers, university students, both male and female, aged Font type effect was significant at p-value = 0.0195, F(1, 43)
20–30 years. For the statistical analysis we used a commercial = 5.885. The text statis and the interaction of font type with text
184 A.M. Azmi, A. Alsaiari / Computers in Human Behavior 39 (2014) 177–186
Fig. 9. Integrating our justification algorithm with the open source Text Editor,
neatpad. Numbers inside the figure will help explain the data flow between the
components (see text).
Fig. 10. A sample text justified using (a) standard MS Word, and (b) neatpad using
our justification algorithm. The blue blocks and red underlines mark places where
rendering is incorrect. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure
legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
status were not significant. Text status was not significant, F(1, 43)
= 2.77 at p-value = 0.1031. The interaction of font type by text sta-
tus was not significant, F(1, 43) = 0.839 at p-value = 0.3648 which is
greater than our confidence interval of 0.05. As shown in Table 4,
and Fig. 14, participants significantly better understood text writ-
ten in ATF font irrespective of being plain or with diacritical mark-
ing when compared with one written in SAF font.
6.3. Discussion
Obviously, there are always some differences in results between
studies. Our study reported participants read plain text in SAF font
with a mean speed of 129 words/min, and this is slightly more than
what was reported by Ramadan (2011), a mean speed of
Fig. 11. A sample of fully diacritized text justified text using (a) standard MS Word,
and (b) our algorithm. The colored marks places of incorrect rendering. (For
interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred
to the web version of this article.)
Fig. 12. Some more samples of justified text using our algorithm.
119 words/min. We believe this difference is natural due to the
nature of the text, its size, and the participants themselves. And
just to put things into perspective, reading speed in other studies.
A mean speed of 138 words/min (Trauzettel-Klosinski & Dietz,
2012), while (Ganayim & Ibrahim, 2013) recommends
127 words/min when designing Arabic text for students. However,
this gives confidence in our results. We can safely claim that our
text justification scheme improves the reading speed, as well as
reading comprehension. Another interesting outcome is that the
diacritical marking had an adverse effect on both reading speed,
as well as text comprehension. This was true across both font
types, though statistically the result could not be confirmed. This
result is consistent with the finding in Ibrahim (2013).
 A.M. Azmi, A. Alsaiari / Computers in Human Behavior 39 (2014) 177–186 185

Table 4 seconds the finding in Ibrahim (2013), we too are not comfortable
Summary of the test results using a = 0.05 (N = 44). with the results. We believe it has to do with the nature of the sam-
F ple text used in the study. Even though the natives are good at dis-
43.04* ambiguating the meaning through context, there remain cases
ATF SAF where context alone is insufficient (Azmi and Almajed, 2013). We
Reading speed
believe the majority of the text can easily be resolved through con-
F 3.11** Plain text 164.27 (7.57) 128.98 (5.47) text. This calls to move away from fully diacritized text and instead
Diacritical 158.14 (7.49) 115.43 (6.61) go for partial diacritized text, where we mark only those letters that
marked text have a profound impact on the semantic of the text. And this what
F makes this investigation more challenging.
5.885***
ATF SAF
7. Conclusion and future work
Reading comprehension
F 2.774**** Plain text 80.11 (2.4) 74.43 (4.1)
Diacritical 77.84 (2.6) 67.61 (3.3)
In this paper we presented an algorithm that justifies Arabic
marked text text using agreed on calligraphic rules. It is a two-step process.
In the first step we use glyph substitution through composing/
Entries expressed as mean value (standard error).
* decomposing of the ligatures. And in the next step we resort to
p < 0.0001.
**
p = 0.085. kashida to fill in the under filled lines. The use of kashida (stretch-
***
p = 0.0195. ing of letters) is again dictated by calligraphic rules which are
****
p = 0.1031. stored in what is known as kashida elongation matrix. We imple-
mented our algorithm and compared its output of justified text
with the standard justification as used by MS Word and found that
our algorithm yield results closer to the calligraphers’ sense of
properly justified text. Furthermore, we explored how this justifi-
cation impacted the reading speed, and comprehension of Arabic
e-text. The experiment on 44 university students revealed that
our justified text did improve their reading speed and comprehen-
sion as well.
Future studies could further improve upon the font we devel-
oped by introducing new glyphs, which should enhance the perfor-
mance of the text justification algorithm. We suggest extending
this study to cover printed material as well. Another study should
undertake the role of diacritical marking on the reading speed and
text comprehension.

Acknowledgments

Fig. 13. Reading speed (words/min) with standard error of means for ATF and SAF
fonts for plain and diacritic text.
The authors would like to thank the participants who made this
work possible. We would also like to thank the anonymous review-
ers for their suggestions which helped us improve our presenta-
tion. This work was supported by a special fund in the Research
Center of the College of Computer and Information Sciences (CCIS)
at King Saud University.

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