Re: Quranic Proposal

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

Dear Abdulhaq,

> I'm referring to the various tajweed-related muduud that govern the length
of
> the pronounciation of the long vowels. (the madda glyph 0x06E4:
madd/muduud
> = concept, madda = calligraphic sign). If you like, we can discuss in more
> detail the conventions and rules relating to tajweed and its calligraphic
> representation in a separate thread.
>
> I'm going to borrow one of these mashaf today isa and I'll have another
look
> for anything unusual (to me).

This would be very good, make sure you post scans.

> I read your paper about constructing fonts using the nuqaaT as ligatures
and
> I can see the logic in that. But if the actual document encoding were
along
> those same lines, then searching documents (e.g. on the internet) for
> particular strings would become very burdensome. Already you have to
> consider alternative spellings, this would mean having to add a further
> spelling variation where some letters have two characters and others only
> one - wouldn't it?

No necessarily. I am already working on a system that uses this principle.
After all, instead of ta' marbuta people often type ha' (I observed that in
many documents that I typeset), and there is the confusion around ya',
Farsi ya' and alif maqsura - three industrial legacy codes that are
identical and undistinguishable in the Qur'an and in classical Arabic. Then
there is the confusion outside Arabic proper, where the Persian versions for
Makka or Makki are different from the Arabic versions in two out of three
Unicodes while the script image and the underlying logic is identical or
practically identical. A more clinical and less nationalistic approach
Arabic script encoding would in fact improve searching on the internet.

t