”އެމް.ވީ.އާއްމުއެފްކޭ“ ގެ ކުރު ތަޢާރުފެއް

The serendipitous circumstances of meeting the renowned calligrapher, Abdulla Waheed, have been narrated in my short commentary on the design of A_Waheed font.

When I was receiving advice form him at that time (1995), he told me that he had made an akuruset (a set of all the Thaana akuru and fili, usually on an A4-sheet of paper) for bold lettering. Such letters are often used for stencil cutting in order to stamp letters for banners hung across streets on important days. When he gave me the akuruset, I made a font of it. The glyphs in the font are different from the akuruset in minor ways to make the them look elegant for the most common size at which the font is used.

The original akuruset is here.

At that time, together with Hussain Zahid, a former student of Majeediyya School, I was working on programming a word processor to handle Thaana typesetting. The work was inspired by the great need for such a program in the Maldives and partly by the significant work of Dr Donald Knuth (of TeX and Metafont fame) who had documented the development of an elaborate word processor in Computers & Typesetting, Volume B: TeX: The Program.  His volumes of The Art of Computer Programming were some of my  beloved books on Computer Science when I studied the discipline at Tasmania University. That was starting in 1980 long before I learnt what a genius he was. A mere reading and organization of the books will convince the reader of the author’s inspiring sense of design.

My involvement with the development of a word processor goes back to the early 1980s. Zahid came into the picture in the early  1990s. I recall Zahid writing the display code in assembly language because computers were so slow then. He suggested naming fonts descriptive of their looks. So I called it Aammu Fala Kathi which means Common Bold Italic. Since the name was too long, it was shortened to AammuFK. That is how the font got its name.  The font is very commonly used for bold lettering in the Maldives. In fact, it is the font of choice for newspaper headlines as seen in the included image.

Thaana fonts intended for large text are quite different from body text fonts. In fact, if this bold font is used as a book font, the text would be almost unreadable. Incidentally, in outstanding Latin fonts, letters are slightly different for different point sizes. AammuFK is characterized by its thick stroke and seems almost force-fitted within a narrow em-square. This is the reason why editors love them; readable text can be fitted within a narrow spacing.

This version of AammuFK uses Opentype features and the outlines have been cleaned from the previous ones. The font rendering engines of most operating systems have improved in the past 20 years so much that the font definition curves can be simplified. This new version has been much improved by the original calligrapher. I thank Abdulla Waheed for his meticulous advice on modifying glyph curves to enhance the look of the font.

Dated: December 20, 2015

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