Re: Encoding the Holy Koran into Unicode

[Munzir Taha <munzirtaha at myrealbox dot com>]

> Salaamun Aleykum Munzir, Adil and others,
Wa Alaikum Assalaam

> It is good to hear interest in a Quran encoding
> project. We have been trying to raise such interest in
> various communities for some time. So far, the
> encoding of the Quran in digital form has been a very
> fragmented area. Different companies have their own
> schemes. There are no standards. I believe that there
> should be a set of standards which organizations and
> individuals who want to publish the Quran using
> computer technology can rely on regardless of which
> company they are working with.
>
> God willing a project could be initiated which aims to
> specify a set of standard guidelines and examples of
> encoding the Quran in computer format. Then font
> manufacturers, publishing software manufacturers and
> other companies can compete in the area of providing
> publishing services such as fonts, publishing
> software, etc. to organizations and individuals who
> want to publish the Quran. This is a common scenario
> for many software applications: The specifications are
> standard and openly available, while companies compete
> in the implementation of the standards.
>
> Would you, Munzir and Adil, be interested in such a
> standardization effort?
>
> Best Regards,
> Mete
If I told you I've understood a single word, I will be lying to you ;-)
Please, Mete, I need more clarification of what type of standard do we lack. 
Give a quick draft.

Diwan used Unicode, OpenType, Java which are all widely accepted `standards' 
but they found these not enough and they tried to patch these creatures to do 
the job. It's much better than to make their own flavor of an encoding system 
or font encoding or adding D++ language ;-)

If we need some standardization it's in the area of pushing the Unicode 
Consortium to accept the proposals by Mr Adil, Roozbeh, Behdad and the 
others. Instead of wasting their time considering adding a heart or spade 
dots over and under letters, Quran ligatures and characters need more 
consideration.

-- 
Munzir Taha,
Telecommunications and Electronics Engineer,
Certified Internet Webmaster, (CIW),
Microsoft Office User Specialist, (MOUS),
New Horizons Computer Learning Centers,
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia