Typophile

Indian/Middle Eastern Market Insight

Jeremy Dooley

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about development for Arabic and the Indian market, especially Devanagari. I was able to speak briefly at TypeCon with someone in the industry who is investing in developing Arabic typefaces. I was surprised there seemingly isn’t very much conversation about and very little interest in developing for the CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) market. Piracy combined with the amount of investment required was cited.

Why is there so much excitement about India and the Middle Eastern market right now? The same disregard for intellectual property is present. Could someone give some additional insight?

Thank you,
JDooley

lunde

I dunno. I work specifically in the area of CJK fonts, and there is plenty of interest. I think it all depends on the person with whom you speak. ;-)

Perhaps part of the recent interest in such fonts is due to the improved infrastructure to support them, specifically that more applications and text engines are able to correctly handle the line layout and typographic challenges that those scripts pose.

Dr. Ken Lunde
Senior Computer Scientist, CJKV Type Development
Adobe Systems Incorporated
lunde@adobe.com

Jeremy Dooley

Thank you for the insight, Dr. Lunde.

Jeremy Dooley
www.insignedesign.com

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