The Falak ACE/OTL Project, part 1

In some way, I've spent most of the first part of my career on The Falak ACE/OTL Project. It was a dream come to life and brought with it a massive anti-climax that eventually led to the creation of this type foundry.

For years (between 2005 and 2011), I imagined a different way of mechanizing the Arabic script. I asked myself a question you've probably asked yourself, too: What if users of the Arabic script invented the printing press? What would the machine be like, and where would type technology be today? Would we still have made letters fit in boxes, or would the technique be different? I believed and still believe it could be different.

Early in my experimentation, I envisioned that Arabic letters could be constructed using the most minimal pieces within a letter and that these pieces could be the glyphs in a font. Like human bodies, letters are unique in their outer appearance. They have a specific outline, proportions, posture, gravity, and features, but on the inside, they share similar mechanisms to make their bodies function. A letter, a body, incorporates a series of elements programmed to make the whole come together.

But then, how do you find the most minimal pieces in a letter? Are some of them shared amongst other letters? And how do you reconstruct words and text based on these elemental units?

I wasn't able to answer these questions on my own. Solutions were beyond my knowledge and skill set at the time. So on April 22nd, 2011 at 4:05 pm, I decided to write Thomas Milo an open-ended email in search of something that I didn't know was coming my way:

> `Dear Mr. Milo,` > > `If I may take a moment of your time to introduce myself: I'm a Lebanese graphic designer currently studying Type design in Barcelona. I have been experimenting for years to understand the essential qualities of the Arabic script in order to, one far away day, be able to create typefaces that respect the beauty of the Arabic script without however remaining traditional. I am still far away from being able to design any letter; still a little lost in the historical problems of our script as it passed to the printing press and the digital platform. So I thought I ought to write you because I highly respect your work and perhaps would be able to meet you one day. I unfortunately do not have a website to refer you to these experiments, for I still work by hand in a bubble of letterforms, but would gladly send you images if they would be of any interest to you.` > > `The motive of this email is a simple introduction, in the hope of meeting you one day!` > > `with much respect and thanks for your time,` > > `Lara`

And that is how my long-term collaboration with Thomas Milo and Mirjam Somers began. Together they are the main driving force of a small Dutch company called DecoType. Along with Mirjam's brother Peter Somers, they invented the Advanced Composition Engine (ACE) in 1984 and have been developing it since then. ACE is a text layout engine explicitly engineered for computing Arabic – even though it could be expanded to support different scripts. After a video call with Thomas, where he showed me the font files used to feed the ACE engine, I became an apprentice in ACE technology. In the images he showed, I saw that DecoType had already made my dream project come to life: They built a technology specifically for Arabic in which a font file is solely formed of elemental glyphs (not full characters) and is associated with data files (that describe the behavior of these elements) to produce text.

Now all that was left to do to make my vision concrete was to design fonts for that technology. And so I planted the seed of Falak ACE.

---

Continue reading: The Falak ACE/OTL Project, part 2: The Beginning