Re: Harakat project: new

[Osama ALASSIRY <osama at alassiry dot com>]

On Sat, 2004-02-21 at 00:02, Karim Elaagouby wrote:
> 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.
> 

What do you mean? most people I know know exactly where harakat are,
(shift + qweraszx`)

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

When I first saw this announcement I got excited, thinking this would be an program/library that automatically inserts tashkeel into arabic text (yes it's possible, see the research on the subject and sakhr's software)