Quran in Unicode format

[lionelf <lionelf at ftc-i dot net>]

Bismillah

Salam

I came across your email address in a discussion dated March 2003. The 
discussion popped up in a search for the text of the Quran in Arabic.

Three years have passed, and things might have changed considerably. If 
I am telling you something you knew already, I apologize, but here goes:

I have developed a script for transliterating Quran and showing tajwiyd. 
The objective of the script was 2-fold: to enable the user having only a 
conventional keyboard to enter accurate Arabic text, and to enable a 
user familiar with Roman script to master Arabic quickly, then learn 
conventional Arabic script at leisure. I call this script vruwmiy 
(pronounced ruwmiy).

It turns out that vruwmiy is capable of encoding more information than 
traditional Arabic script. For example, the group 'an naas' has the 
second nuwn prolonged: we can show this in vruwmiy but there is no 
mechanism in traditional Arabic.

During my work, I encountered all the problems of representing Quranic 
Arabic in Unicode, and I think I have found a solution.

Let's assume that we have codepoints in Unicode, in a single font, for 
every combination of superscripts and subscripts occurring in the Quran. 
For example, we have a code for the nuwn in 'anbiyaa', with the small 
superscripted mim and the sukuwn on the nuwn. If we don't have such a 
font, we can prepare a metafont: that is, a font with all these 
codepoints, assembled from whatever fonts they occur in; the only 
restriction is that the metafont doesn't actually occur in Unicode.

It is a simple matter to convert this Unicode text to vruwmiy, then run 
it through a post-processor to smooth it out a little, in accordance 
with the principles of vruwmiy. The result is text which can be read 
quickly and easily, and shows tajwiyd.

This text can then be converted back to conventional Arabic by the 
reverse process. To me, this means that by working in vruwmiy instead of 
traditional Arabic, we can prepare a text without any internal font 
changes, using the metafont.

Once this text has been verified, we can then automatically translate 
it, using a basic Unicode font with most of the code points, and putting 
in code points from other fonts where necessary.

If you think this would work and resolve the sort of problems I have 
myself encountered, please let me know.

Ma'a as salamah

Ahmad Asad





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