Typophile

Persian spacing

juanacevedo

Hello folks,

Having done some Arabic typesetting in the past, I now need to set a few pages in Persian for a book. This has made me realise the many subtle differences between Arabic and Persian typesetting (bit slow, I know). Apparently it is difficult to find information on this in English on the web, and I have this particularly nagging (because visually prominent) question:

in Persian, should there always be a space between a conjunctive waw and the following word?
is this space (if mandatory) breakable, or no line breaks are allowed after it?

For example:
in Arabic you would write "wasalAm"
وسلام

in Persian, do you write "wa salAm"?
و سلام

is that an optional thing?

Many thanks in advance for your help,
Juan

Hrant H Papazian

{To Follow}

froo

Are you sure it wasn't a mistake (like double spaces in Latin)?

juanacevedo

Well, the sample I have is a text of 6-7 pages set at a university in Iran, and this spacing is throughout. If it is plain wrong, then I guess it means their typesetting is really bad, that's why I would like to confirm with someone who has experience on this.

Khaled Hosny

BTW, in Arabic both forms are permitted depending on the preference of the author (it is partly regional), I myself use a thin non-breaking space for typeset material, otherwise no space at all to avoid a waw by itself at the end of the line (which is as bad as a comma at the beginning of a line). No idea about Persian, though.

Bahman Eslami

Maybe it's late to answer this, but as a Persian native I have to say both forms are permitted. but the first one is more legible, because "wa" means "and" in Persian and that could cause ambiguity.

brianskywalker

.

Captured from web.archive.org on 12 Feb 2013. view this capture