Comparative study of Tahoma font and the structural principle of Persian calligraphy

In past the needs of society, including business competition in the form of advertisements, posters, newspapers, books and other publications, provide an opportunity for designer till they operate new art forms for creating new visual expression. Nowadays, with entering computer into human life and transferring information with it, the media isn’t limited to print media. Increasing life speed and volume data, which human concern it, is led to appear virtual media. They operate much stronger and faster than other media.
Virtual space is an environment that is constructed by invisible information which can take different forms to itself. In fact, cyberspace can be used to describe all kinds of infomative resources in networks. Therefore, virtual space is a different type of a virtual, digital reality that is constructed in computer networks and can be considered a synonym with the World Wide Web.
Font design, in its historical line direction, has been dependent on technological capabilities and long with, it started to optimize traditional calligraphy in new technology space. At present, with the growing volume of data and the need for rapid transmission, print media deposits a significant contribution to digital media in cyber space and this share is increasing every moment. Now we need a specifically font design in media.
At the beginning of the boom of digital media, web designers used standards font for displaying their own texts and the public of Persian language websites used “Tahoma” as a standards font. With advent of web fonts possibility to use fonts that was not existent in users’ system. Therefore, when the designers are using of web fonts, they ensure that the last users’ screen visit this page with their desired font.
However, despite remedying problem in displaying fonts in cyberspace as well as Tahoma is the most widely used among Persian language speaker. Nowadays, it is believed that Tahoma is the most appropriate fonts for Persian writing in webpages. Perhaps the reason is that the users’ eyes get used to the see these fonts like Tahoma, which existed from the beginning and they are inattentive to its strengths and weakness.
It seems that this font is far from Persian calligraphy principles and it is used for its abundant coordination with web space structure. On this line, this paper is proceeded to basic aim in studding of the conformity "Tahoma" font with formic structure in Persian letters and examining the similarities and differences that are based on the comparative studding on this font structure and four important principles in the Persian Naskh calligraphy which include: principle, proportionality, composition and the baseline.
The result shows that many changes which is used in Tahoma is only based on designer's lake of adequate knowledge from Persian calligraphy and there is no relevance in maintaining readability of the letters in pixel space. Also one of the reasons that user's wide pearly use from this font can be supported by most browsers and there is a coordination rate between this fonts with screen.