Quran Encoding Project

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

Salaamun Aleykum,

In line with my previous question, I have a
suggestion. The Arabic Quran XML file in the LibQuran
/data/xml directory is quite nice, but encoding the
Quran with King Fuad/King Fahd precision is indeed a
daunting task. It can easily make a whole project of
its own. Technical expertise in Unicode and smart font
technology as well as expertise in Uthmanic
orthography is required. Additionally there isn't just
one manuscript out there to encode in digital form.
There is the King Fuad (Egyptian) edition, the King
Fahd edition (which is pretty much the same as King
Fuad), and there are older manuscripts like Tashkent
Quran (Gold Quran). All of these need to be
individually encoded in Unicode as seperate files for
research purposes. Then you may also need seperate
fonts to render these different manuscripts (If you've
ever looked at Tashkent Quran, the calligraphy looks
quite different than King Fahd. So this is a massive
project of its own.

Would anybody be interested in contributing to an
open-source project for encoding the Quran in Unicode
with full accuracy? Or do you have any suggestion as
to why this should not be an open-source project
separate than LibQuran, but could be a part of
LibQuran?

Peace,
Mete