Project-1

It is said that if someone is born with a particular malady, he or she gets used to that malady and it becomes part of their being. The maladies and problems of Persian fonts have a similar story; they suffered a malady since the introduction of litho print and thereafter in the age of lead fonts. Although Iranians returned to the use of litho print for some time (due to an attachment to Nastaligh font), this problem continued well into the pre-digital age, and no one imagined that there would be a cure.  Even after the widespread use of digital tools and their abundant potentials for Latin fonts, we couldn’t have imagined a day when we would have Iranian software capable of providing reasonable spacing between characters and words, creating professional and accurate shapes and placing desinential inflection markers in their proper place. 
For years, graphic designers were testing different softwares and various methods, to simply meet their professional demands, albeit incomplete and defective. There are hardly any Iranian graphic designers who have not manually moved characters to their proper space and composition after typesetting a body of text. I cannot think of any such designer who is not fed up with shifted inflection markers and who has not had to amend and reconstruct capitalized characters time and again. 
The good news is that this malady has finally found a cure. Maryam Software has recently released a new application to the market named “Bartar Font” (Qalam Bartar). Although many graphic designers are still skeptical of this new software, as they were of its predecessors, it has brought joy to many others in the short period of its release. It is also interesting to see that Arabic countries were also unable to amend this issue, despite larger budgets and employing a number of international experts. If large Western firms had developed such a software, they would most probably have launched it as a revolution in typesetting. 
If we decide not to call “Bartar Font” a revolution in Persian typesetting, it is undoubtedly a huge leap toward perfection for the following reasons: 

-First; all of the fonts that the Iranian graphic designers are so fond of have been reconstructed and developed precisely. Their defects are eliminated and various problems resulting from previous amateur developments are resolved.
-Second; in addition to the two usual baselines, an additional baseline has been designed for each font, aligning the characters properly.
-Third; spaces between all of the characters have been rectified. Improved spacing has reduced the loose structure of texts and more content can now be accommodated in a smaller space. This should be of particular interest to publishers as it saves paper and helps reduce book prices.  
-Fourth; new fonts have been introduced which were in high demand.  Designers can also purchase extra fonts online. 
-Fifth; calligraphic fonts have also been properly and desirably developed. Displacement and better composition have been made possible and more importantly, the fonts can now be directly typed in various graphic programs. 
-Sixth; Bartar Font has focused on widely-used software such as those in the Adobe collection (InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop) and is well-adapted for InDesign in particular. 
-Seventh; Bartar Font is regularly updated and is becoming more user-friendly. Major improvements have taken place in its latest version in regard to keyboard use and display. 
-Eighth; the application has the capacity for any font to be entered into system and included in the Bartar font database.
-Ninth; punctuation marks and abbreviations which were previously incompatible with Persian font baselines have been redesigned and properly adapted. 
-Tenth; an appropriate Latin font is selected to use with each Persian font, where the sizes are automatically adjusted to compliment one another. This measure prevents the distortion of lines in bilingual texts. 
-Eleventh; both PC and Mac versions have been developed and the users of each system are equally enjoying its benefits.
Twelfth; proper security is in place for the fonts, in order to protect the copyright for their designers. 

An important point for the attention of graphic designers is that Bartar Font is the outcome of collaboration of a team of software experts and a group of young graphic designers. We congratulate all our colleagues who have cooperated in this major project. More importantly, we should help Maryam Software to solve the minor issues that might still come up and to expand its scope of services.