Dear Nadim,
Salam.
The Zekr project is a try to ease the use of Quran on everyone's
desktop. It is easy, small, simple and cute! It is written with this
idea, and I tried hard to make something for real *end-users* (not
expert developers).
I think this is the most important point of difference between Zekr
and qtquran. qtquran is written for Linux users (who are supposed to
be of a little expertise), while Zekr basically addresses Windows
users. It has a quite simple installation for a novice user.
I'd seen Arabeyes' qtquran after the 0.1 release of the Zekr project
(more that 1 year ago) after finding a port of that project on Java
platform (http://kuran.sf.net).
About the translations, there is a note in about dialog box stating
that this software is released without any warranty. You are right,
and it is a good idea to have such a disclaimer on the installation
part. I should say that even main Quran text file has some typos
(addressed ono Zekr mailing list). Although I had changed the whole
Quran text for 0.3.0 release there found to be at least 2 typos
(trivial ones with diacritics) in the newest version.
I didn't used quran text used for earlier versions of qtquran, because
found the one for the Zekr more precise (rich in diacritics). The
newer version (if I'm correct) uses some special Unicode characters
which are not supported yet on Windows (and there are very few fonts
supporting that). I use Cp1256 encoding for all the Quran text. It is
much smaller in size (each character is 8 bit) and JRE 1.4.1+ supports
that. The Quran text charset can be changed through an external
configuration file. The translations are all free to use whatever
encoding Java SE supports. I don't know why someone shall read Zekr's
Quran text using Vim/Emacs, when there exists graphical editors ;)
I think it is good also to talk a bit about licensing. There are two
translation (Makarem[fa] and Kuliev[ru]) which are permitted to use
for the Zekr projects (by asking their authors). The Shakir[en]
translation is also available in the public release of the Zekr,
since: 1. this transltioan is publicly available every where on the
Internet, 2. I think it is more than 25 year old corpus. Other
resources are available on resource page
(http://siahe.com/zekr/resources.html).
This could be a good discussion for addressing issues on the two
projects, and try to have better community on the projects.
Best regards.
On 7/12/06, Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com> wrote:
--- Mohsen Saboorian <mohsens at gmail dot com> wrote:
> This release has a number of new features over version 0.2.0 and
works
> fine on Win32/Mac/Linux.
> a.. Quran translation: different translations of the Quran can be
> added to Zekr
> b.. Theme: you can customize your own theme or use 2 built-in
themes
> of the Quran browser. Themes also can be added to the app
dynamically.
> c.. 4 different view layouts (Quran only, translation only,
mixed and
> separate)
> d.. Translation for search results
> There are 3 built-in translations (Shakir: English, Makarem:
Farsi, and
> Kuliev: Russian). Please see release notes for more details on the
release,
> or Zekr plan page for the project road map.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/zekr
Sorry for the late reply and Barek Allah feek for this great work;
since
I'm a bit removed from Arabeyes' Quran project (M.Yousif ?) and having
seen some of the screenshots I can see that there is great commonality
between the two efforts. Could you please comment in that regard ?
Have
you looked at the code that is housed on Arabeyes [1] ? Where do the
two projects differ/diverge ?
Regarding translations -- have you contacted anyone that was willing
to certify translations as valid/authentic (I'm unaware of an entity
out
there that does this currently) ? How do you maintain the data's
integrity ? Are there are precautions in-place to make sure that the
data used is the intended proper one (what I'm thinking about is
someone
maliciously creating a LiveCD say with modified data content claiming
its authentic, any way to protect against that ?).
If you are using the unicode encoding/charset (are you ?) have you
addressed some of the Unicode character issues which M.Yousif had
posted
about on the 'general' mailing-list ? If you are using a "self-mapped"
or non-standard encoding have you considered Unicode ? In other words,
will anyone using mlterm/vim/emacs/etc be able to properly see all the
data files' contents on a simple terminal sans the GUIs ?
I'd love to hear how Zekr and Arabeyes' Quran project differ and what
sort of effort is involved in bringing them closer together to better
utilize our community's limited resources.
[1] http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Quran
Thoughts/comments/ideas ?
- Nadim
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