Could a new typeface make it easier for the more than 400 million Arabic speakers around the world to read?
Type designers Dr. Nadine Chahine and Thomas Jockin joined forces to find out. They created Readex Pro in Arabic using the methodology behind Lexend, made for Latin. The name Readex was chosen as a shortened form of “reading expanded.”
When Dr. Bonnie Shaver-Troup started the Lexend project, her goal was to help people to read more easily and fluently by reducing visual noise. The Lexend fonts have distinct letterforms, and offer the option to widen tracking (the spacing between letters) together with widening the shapes of individual letterforms themselves. This novel functionality is based on a theory known as the “Shaver-Troup Formulation,” which was described in detail in a 2003 USA patent application.