Re: Encoding the Holy Koran into Unicode

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

Salaamun Aleykum,

I was obviously not clear on what I wanted to say :-)
It's my lack of better words. May God forgive me. When
I said "there are no standards" I really didn't mean
to say that there were no standards being utilized at
all. Unicode and OpenType are obvious base standards
that these companies/organizations use. What I really
wanted to say was that since Unicode is missing a
couple of codepoints to make it possible to encode the
whole Quran properly in Unicode, these
companies/organizations also use their own proprietary
codepoints, although they use Unicode codepoints
whenever possible. And this is done in a non-standard
way. It would be great if we could gather a group of
companies/organizations/individuals who are committed
to making the necessary additions to Unicode and
finally make this process standardized so that font
manufacturers do not need to "tweak" Unicode in their
own way in order to encode the Quran.

There are also several other cases where there is a
bit of non-standard activity. Sometimes it looks like
there is more than one codepoint in Unicode that you
can encode a letter with in the Quran. Two good
examples are "laayat" in verse 2:248 and "asaoow" in
verse 30:10. In "laayat", one could choose to encode
the hamza there with U+0621 or U+0654 and design their
font accordingly because it looks like a hamza above,
while the proper encoding should be U+0654. The same
also for the hamza in asaoow in 30:10; in this word
the hamza is on top of the U+0640 tatweel, so some may
prefer to encode this as U+0654 (hamza above) while
this is no different than any other hamza that is
encoded as U+0621 (regular hamza). The Unicode
Consortium has to impose these encoding standards
which they do not do at the moment.

We can come together to push these standards into
Unicode Arabic by influencing the Unicode Consortium
to make the necessary additions to Unicode.

Best Regards,
Mete

--- Munzir Taha <munzirtaha at myrealbox dot com> wrote:
> > 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
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