Harakat project: new

[Karim Elaagouby <karim at elaagouby dot net>]

Salam all,


I would like to bring attention to the use of harakat
(fat'ha, kasra, thamma etc.) and propose a solution to what I
see is a major problem.

In the last several years, I noticed that TV news reporters
make a lot of mistakes that sound like grammatical mistakes,
as for instance starting a verb in passive voice with a
fat'ha, e.g. "yaktobo" instead of "yoktabo".
While reading news papers, I found myself having to read past
the first few words in a sentence to realize that I made a
mistake.

More generally, I noticed that electronic text in arabic tend
to have less tashkil than hand-written one. 
Regardless of the fact that arabic is so sofiticated and you
can read it without tashkil, tashkil definitely improve the
speed of reading and avoid confusion with regard to word
meanings.
But why is tashkil not used to often as it should be on
computers?

Actually, the answer is simple: it's not easily accessible to
do so, most keyboards don't even show the keys for harakat,
so most people don't know how to put a haraka on a letter in
MS Word, for example.

So, I started dreaming up a solution to help anyone put
tashkil on text.

1- A word processor (e.g. openoffice.org or MS word) should
have a Tool bar that shows icons harakat which when clicked
simply insert a haraka where the cursor is located.

2- An applet may be run, independently of any application.
The applet should show a list of icons, one for each haraka,
and when clicked the applet inserts the active haraka in the
window. 

I personnally like the 2nd solution and I am working to
implement "xharaka" (or any other name we choose). An 
XWindows applet that displays a table to icons (in the manner
of xclock), and when an icon is clicked the mouse cursor
changes (in the manner of xkill), when a window is clicked, X
inserts the selected character (haraka) into the input
stream to that window.

This is still in the project phase. and I want to say this: I
am not fluent at all in X programming. I have no idea how
long it will take me to complete this, and I would gladly
pass it on to someone else with good X skills. 
So, please step forward.

Cheers,

-Karim


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Karim Elaagouby