Another developmental release of Amiri font, marking a major developmental milestone.

Amiri was developed using a novel, and natural, approach of separating dots from base of the glyph and treating them as diacritical marks (which what they really are), this allowed much more flexibility than the more conventional approach of treating the dot and its base as a whole.

In the early developmental stages things were fine, but as the need for more complex tasks surfaced, things were getting exponentially harder and harder and it become clear that OpenType is not ready for this kind of development, and in the last few months I’ve been hitting the limits of OpenType as spec’d as well as hitting bugs in almost all OpenType implementation, essentially tying my hands from using more advanced (but less tasted) parts of the spec.

So I, regrettably, decided to revert to more conventional and well tried OpenType techniques. As a side effect there is now a one to one mapping between characters and glyphs in its various contextual forms (I’m still avoiding ligatures like plague). This fixes a whole lot of bugs and allows the font to work with more OpenType implementation, on the other hand number of glyphs grew by a factor of 7 and file size got tripled.

With this new turn, the font is ready to move into beta stage, and next release is likely to be the last alpha.