Beautiful

Forgive me for getting a bit emotional; I just couldn’t believe that your colleagues would spend many years working on a Nastaliq-style Arabic digital font with the hope that Scripture might be translated into this language one day...Thank you!

So said a potential new funding partner in the middle of a meeting in Asia last year. The font she was talking about is called Awami Nastaliq, and it was developed by the Writing Systems Technology team of Wycliffe’s strategic partner, SIL.

Awami Nastaliq is an Arabic-script font specifically intended for a wide variety of languages of Southwest Asia. Its sloping beauty means that it is a much more complex font to render on computers. Many Arabic characters usually need around four shapes to enable it to be typed, but a Nastaliq character typically has more than 20 shapes as it is so fluid and complex. Font designers and computer programmers from Scotland, the USA and Asia worked together to produce the correct shaping.

The Writing Systems Technology team gives away the fonts they develop in order to provide a service to the wider community. One of the designers noted, “People download an unbelievable number of our fonts – hundreds of thousands of times. So as well as Bible translation, our fonts are being used for tens of millions of webpages around the world to enable communication that otherwise couldn’t happen in that language.”

Read more of Alfred Thompson’s story at wycliffe.org.uk/stories/what-your-team-has-done-for-our-father-and-his-kingdom/

Over the years, I have regularly asked for prayer for those who come through Equip orientation. One past “Equipper” is Becca (wycliffe.org/partner/spalinger), who has been a font/type designer now for ten years. Your prayers and gifts for my Wycliffe ministry have been a part of her journey as she continues to help create fonts and impact language groups just like these. Thank you!

Personal Update

We are thankful for all your prayers and for all the medical care Mom has received, between her primary care, her heart valve replacement, her pacemaker, and even the balancing of the meds that are so important to her daily life. We are confident that “...all the days of my life were written in your book before any of them came to be.” (Psalm 139:16, NLV) ...and know that God is present with us through each day, now and in the future.

Thank you for your faithful prayers and encouragements!