Clarification of what initiated the recent Quran proposal discussion

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

Salaam All Arabeyes.org general mailing list
participants.

I would like to clarify herein what initiated this
recent discussion thread regarding the Quran proposal.
I and several friends have been working on encoding
the Quran in Unicode for more than a year. In the
process we met with Mr. Thomas Milo who has been doing
research on the Arabic script for several decades and
working on Arabic font solutions for almost two
decades (DecoType). We shared a common interest that
we would like to see a solution to the current problem
of rendering the Quran from Unicode encoded text with
uncomprimising precision. Fortunately we learned that
this is exactly what he has been working on for a
number of years and that he is very close to having a
complete solution to accomplish this. We saw some
samples of his font technology and was quite impressed
by it. Here is a sample Quran PDF:
http://69.55.224.165/2-33-35-39-48.pdf
On the bidi at unicode dot org both himself and us proposed a
few changes to the Unicode Arabic block that would fix
this issues with supporting the Quran in Unicode. 

Meanwhile last week I found out that Arabeyes.org is
working on a proposal to add new codepoints to the
Unicode Arabic block and since we share the same
interest, I decided to tell Tom about it. I asked him
to criticize the proposal from a Unicode point of
view. He sent me an email with the criticism that I
asked from him. It was supposed to be a personal note
and not a diplomatic criticism. I asked him whether I
could forward this to the Arabeyes.org list and he
preferred to prepare a more appropriate criticism
rather than the personal note he sent me. So I invited
him to join this mailing list. After having trouble
signing on to the Arabeyes.org general mailing list, I
asked him again whether I could simply forward his
criticism to the proposal in the personal note that he
sent me and he permitted me to do that. And this whole
new thread of discussion regarding the Quran proposal
started like that. Please recognize that his initial
criticism was meant to be a personal note to me and
not one prepared for this public mailing list so
consequently it was received not very well. The
discussion unfortunately turned into a prestige
battle. There was also no need to turn this into an
"Arab teaching a non-Arab the Arabic language"
situation. Tom is very well versed in Arabic and a
fluent speaker so it is not necessary to lecture him
on the Arabic language, especially Quranic typography.

Please let's correct this situation and let's start a
fresh new discussion thread in a more formal manner
without getting at the personal level. Let's solely
discuss the technical merits of the said proposal and
the existing criticism for it in an amicable manner
and try to come to a mutual understanding in order to
devise a joint proposal that details a uniform way to
encode the Quran in Unicode - including any characters
that need to be added. Insha-Allah we can accomplish
this.

Salaam,
Mete