Creation of Al Mabsout Moroccan fonts format

The Moroccan calligraphy is an original and civilizational cultural heritage, which it is necessary to protect, byits introduction to the everyday life whether it is in the architecture, the advertising or still in multimedia. The majority of attempts to digitize the Moroccan writings led to fonts which does not respect artistic and aesthetic specificities of Moroccan calligraphy. Hence the need to develop a process to create Moroccan fonts based on scientific and technical study. So the main aim of this work is to develop an automatic procedure to create Moroccan fonts based on manuscripts which are characterized and known by their artistic values. The Arabic calligraphy is one of the largest art events of the Islamic world. In Morocco, calligraphy knew a quite specific development and that like other forms of artistic expression. During the last centuries, the Moroccan manuscripts have been marked by the richness of their decorations: the geometric and floral motifs associated with characters to draw bands and harmonious decorative compositions. They generally appear on the title pages. Documentary heritage reflects the care and skill of Moroccan copyists. They have diversified and enriched the Moroccan calligraphy. They invented styles of great aesthetic value. Researchers distinguish between five Moroccan writing styles which are: As an illustration of the proposed method, we are interested first to the generation of Al Mabsout style. There exist some manuscripts using this style. The most representative is the Moshafe Al Hassani (Coran Hassani). The second phase is related to digitization and character segmentation leading to construct a database of alphabetic characters from Moroccan calligraphic style. The third phase consists to select alphabetic characters that should be included in the font. Each selected character must be close to its other representations in the same manuscript. In the forth phase, a vectorization of the selected characters is performed. This vectorization phase makes it possible to freely increase or decrease the character size without loss of quality. For vectorizing the character images that we obtained in the previous step we used the potrace algorithm. The last phase consists of creating the font, which goes through the creation of glyphs (a glyph is a graphical representation of a character). OpenType is the format we have adopted for the flexibility and the special features it represents After the generation of font corresponding to the different selected characters, we obtained this font:.