Re: Encoding the Holy Koran into Unicode

[Adil Allawi <adil at diwan dot com>]

Salaam Munzir,

I thank you for your kind comments. It is always a pleasure to receive complements from my peers. I will pass this on to others in Diwan.

I sent one file to you - the second file is because the file was sent from a Mac.

Diwan's Quran project has been a labour of love. I think anyone who approached this project from a commercial point of view would never have started. It has taken Diwan about 5 years to full research the issues involved and another 2 years to turn this into a final product.

Diwan's nearest office to Saudi Arabia is in Dubai. We do have agents in Saudi Arabia but it is better to contact the Dubai office directly.

Their address is:

Diwan Software Dubai
Office 128 Building 1
Dubai Internet City
Dubai, PO BOX 27370
UAE

tel: 00 971 4 391 1888
fax: 00 971 4 391 1898
 

I would be very pleased to cooperate with the open source community in any way possible. But you must bear in mind that Diwan is a relatively small company and it has to protect its main assets to stay in business - of which the Quran project is one.

As I have said, the OpenType font format is insufficient to deal with the requirements of Quran and also the Unicode specification does not help either - Diwan used its own text engine to handle the formatting correctly. A Quran font on its own would not provide a proper solution- so simply licensing a font from Diwan would not really be the way to go. I do not know how we can proceed on any form of cooperation but I am open to any suggestions you may have.

Kind regards,

Adil

At 12:25 pm +0100 6/4/03, Munzir Taha wrote:
>Salaam Adil
>> Please find enclosed my paper on Diwan's work to encode the Quran as
>> Unicode.
>I received two files: one of them is corrupted and the other Koran2Unicode.pdf
>is Ok. Is it one file or two?
>
>OK Mr. Adil let me say that your paper is the best pdf file I have ever seen.
>It's now resides calmly in a sacred folder in my system ;-) Your message is
>also very valuable to me. At last, we have a nice Koran for publishing
>purposes. Alhamdulillah. God bless you all who have contributed to this. 
>Ameen. I will recommend your software to everybody I know in the DTP industry
>and I know of many for sure. Just tell me whose your agent in Saudi Arabia,
>Riyadh. (any phone numbers?).
>
>Another issue is that there is a promising project of Quran in arabeyes.org.
>People there wants to implement Quran in GNU/linux OS and we were thinking to
>make a Unicode Koran font. Now I see your technology as the best solution I
>have ever met across. (much better than 3B2 which is widely used for this
>purpose). The question is how can the linux community and you benefit from
>this? I hope you love the free (as in freedom)/open source movement like us
>so you will help us. Otherwise, we will consider paying you some money to
>allow us to use your font under a certain license. I have no good vision of
>the subject yet but I will discuss it with the people at the developer list
>and there are knowlegable people there!
>
>> Hello Munzir,
>>
>> Please find enclosed my paper on Diwan's work to encode the Quran as
>> Unicode. The project is complete and it is already in Diwan's commercial
>> product - al-Nashir al-Sahafi Yaqout.
>>
>> Java 1.4 is now final and the Java Quran is also complete and running at
>> http://mushaf.diwan.com. This can be browsed freely on the Internet. You
>> would need to have Java 1.4 installed on your computer - this can be
>> downloaded from www.java.sun.com.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Adil
>>
>> At 3:16 pm +0100 1/4/03, info at diwan dot com wrote:
>> >>Organization: New Horizons
>> >>From: Munzir Taha <munzirtaha at myrealbox dot com>
>> >>To: info at diwan dot com
>> >>Subject: I want more info about the Quran encoding urgently, please
>> >>Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 12:16:23 +0100
>> >>
>> >>Salamu Alaikum,
>> >>I loved your software very much and it's recommended to me by an expert
>> >>publisher. I want more info about the encoding of Quran in Unicode. What
> > >>about the paper you have provided at Unicode? can I get a copy? Is it
> > >> ready now? Java 1.4 is still beta can I use it? where in Sun's site can
>> >> I find info? Will the Quran encoding be available for free in the
>> >> Internet so any one can use it?
>> >>--
>> >>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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Adil Allawi
Technical Director   Diwan Software Ltd