Re: Proposal for the Basis of a Codepoint Extension to Unicode forthe Encoding of the Quranic Manuscripts

[Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya <meor dot ridzuan at gmail dot com>]

I think to disregard unicode totally will not bring us much good. On
the other hand , there won't be much support from application point of
view. Many commercial vendor has done that in the past. However, the
main advantage of keeping it within unicode framework is the support
base. Many windows application will have an instant support, the same
goes to gnome application ( I think kde should have the same level of
support, but not yet tested it). For example, the text that I've
created can be displayed correctly in Internet Explorer, Firefox,
notepad etc. If we disregards unicode comlpetely, then only our own
application will have the proper support.
My intention is that this will be used by publisher/author of Islamic
books. Thus, they can continue to use whatever software they are
using, but with a proper support for Quran. Books don't have to use
scan image of the Quranic text anymore. We can encode many other great
books (like hadith collection etc) in digital form, without limiting
ourselve to certain application support.
What makes you think that there is a great need to design it from
ground up? Can you give specific example where unicode fall short?
This is an honest question, not trying to belittle anyone. I agree
that unicode does have several shortcomings, but I think it can be
fixed.

Regards.

On 6/22/05, Gregg Reynolds <gar at arabink dot com> wrote:
> Abdulhaq Lynch wrote:
> >>The thing is that the contemporary Qur'an printings are almost completely
> >>render-able today with Unicode using a character-based (not glyph based)
> >>encoding scheme, only a few mode codepoints need to be addded that's it.
> >>The XML elements and other such high level semantics we are talking about
> >>address what is beyond the rendering, i.e. text analysis. So the rendering
> >>problem is almost solved, IMHO.
> >>
> >
> >  Hi Mete
> >
> > one problem is that the rendering problem has been 'almost solved' for a long
> > time now.
> >
> Hi,
> 
> Also, keep in mind that rendering is not the only purpose of text
> encoding.  Machine manipulation of the text is equally important.  We
> want to search for stuff, sort things, etc. based on the "natural"
> semantics of written Arabic.  The most fundamental problem with Unicode
> is precisely that it is optimized for certain classes of language.  It's
> a surface encoding, which works great for languages like English, which
> have a surface orthography.  But for a language like Arabic, with a more
> complex relation between orthography and lexical structure, such an
> encoding design falls far short of what could be done.  The restriction
> of Unicode to visual abstract semantics represents a subtle (and no
> doubt unintentional) bias.  That's why I recommend disregarding Unicode
> and designing from the ground up to satisfy the needs of the
> Arabic-speaking community.
> 
> -gregg
> 
> 
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