Re: Quranic Proposal

["Thomas Milo" <t dot milo at chello dot nl>]

Nadim,

> It would be best to post the PDF somewhere accessible on the internet and
> post a URL/link instead; we have strict size limits on what is allowed on
> the lists due to the fact that we still have a great number of people
using
> dialups and we don't want to punish them needlessly.

Will do so when it is ready.

> BTW: do try to veer away from HTML mails and use PDFs to site examples.

I hope you don't mind an occasional, functional exception.

> Can you, per my last email, define "font technology" ?  Are you referring
> to display engines ?

Any technology that serves to display or render nominal Unicode in graphic
form could be called font technology. Such font technology usually has a
static and a dynamic component. For instance, OpenType has OTF fonts with
optional internal tables (static component) and a rendering engine called
Uniscribe (USP10.DLL - dynamic component). The function of dynamic component
for OpenType in Adobe environments is executed by a engine called CoolType.
There is an organisation called SIL that has its own font format and an
engine called Graphite
(http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=GraphiteFo
nts). My own company uses plain PostScript or True type fonts, supplementary
tables and has ACE (Arabic Calligraphic Engine ) as its dynamic component.
We are planning to use the OpenType font format to merge the outlines and
the tables in a next version.

We prefer to describe our technology as an "Arabic Script Synthesis", for
the following reason. It was developed in a period of over two decades of
intensive analysis and is totally dedicated to preserving the great Islamic
calligraphic tradition. In this approach our high-end capability to handle
regular typographic and simplified fonts came as a by-product.

ACE technology stands in stark contrast with regular font technology, for
which Arabic is an odd-ball script that must be simplified in order to make
is easier and cheaper integrate it into existing computer environments. The
computer industry and font companies do attempt any academic research into
the how and why of Arabic script behaviour. Consequently their products are,
without exception, below any acceptable standard required for quality Arabic
computing.

As a result of defective font technology and incomplete and ambiguous
Unicode support for Arabic, new ad hoc editions of the qur'an with hybrid or
tweaked spellings are proliferating even in Unicode format. A good example I
recently downloaded from here:

http://www.divineislam.co.uk/DivineIslam/Islamic_Computing/Resources/unicode_quran.shtml

I hope to find support for the idea that a historically correct encoding for
Arabic has to be developed for the Qur'an - and for the Arabic Literary
Legacy.

t