Re: Quran data (Arabic text)

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

Salaamun Aleykum,

You are right. I believe correcting the Arabic text
should be of higher priority. As you may know,
encoding the Arabic Quran in Unicode with the accuracy
equivalent to that of a calligraphically scribed Quran
is not a trivial task at all. There are companies such
as Diwan (www.diwan.com) and Tradigital
(www.tradigital.de) who have spent enourmous amount of
resources in order to accomplish this task, and there
is yet more to be done. So this is a pretty big
project, but yet it is a must. It seems to me that two
companies are the frontiers in this field so far, the
ones that I've mentioned above, Diwan and Tradigital.
There are also other companies and groups who would
like to see it be possible to render the Quran with
calligraphic accuracy from Unicode text. The problem
is that the codepoints that need to be used for
certain letters and diacritics in the Quran are not
clearly specified in Unicode. I think that if a joint
effort was to be initiated by the interested entities
with the objective of defining specific guidelines for
exactly which Unicode codepoints should be used for
which instances of characters in the Quran, that would
be very useful. Such an initiative would have to work
closely with the Unicode Consortium. I know that Mr.
Diwan is drafting a proposal to add a few more
codepoints to Unicode Arabic block to allow the
encoding of certain characters in the Quran. At the
same time Thomas Milo is trying to influence the
Unicode Consortium in this matter. There are many
other I bet who are interested in this same issue. I
believe that God willing it would be more efficient if
all these individuals joined their efforts and worked
together in order to make a stronger case to the
Unicode Consortium. I wonder what your thoughts are on
this.

Peace,
Mete

--- Ahmed El Helw <ahmedre at gawab dot com> wrote:
> 
> salam alaikum --
> i think a much more important issue is the accuracy
> of the
> arabic text itself -- when half of several ayats are
> missing,
> this is a BIG issue and a BIG problem.  how can
> people use any
> software powered by this library if the arabic xml
> files
> themselves are incomplete?  i posted many various
> posts about
> different ayahs that were incomplete and have not
> gotten any
> replies nor has anyone made an attempt to fix them. 
> the
> presence of complete arabic text can help in other
> things - for
> example, if we have correct arabic text, writing a
> program that
> 'syntax highlights' things based on tajweed is quite
> possible
> and would be beautiful if done -- and is easy, but
> how can it be
> done when the arabic itself has incompleteness in
> it?
> walsalam alaikum,
> -ahmed
>
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