AlQalam Project Page

Welcome to AlQalam project page!

This page includes information about AlQalam project. It is a research project carried out at the Electronics and Electrical Communications Department, Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University. This project started in 2005 and work is still under progress.

Project description

AlQalam is an Arabic typesetting system aimed at producing high quality Arabic written texts close to the writings of Arabic calligraphers. Visit this link for more on Arabic typesetting. It is based on the T_EX and Metafont open source typesetting and font design systems - visit the T_EX Users Group website for more information.

Published papers

Since 2005 four final year BSc graduation projects and one MSc degree thesis were carried on the project, four conferences attended, and three papers published in journals. Below are the published papers:

[1]

H. A. H. Fahmy, “AlQalam for typesetting traditional Arabic texts”, TUGboat, vol. 27, No. 2, Jan. 2007. This paper groups our work already presented in the EuroT_EX 2006 and TUG 2006 conferences. [ Conference Proceedings ]

[2]

A. M. Sherif and H. A. H. Fahmy, “Parameterized Arabic font development for AlQalam,” TUGboat, vol. 29, No. 1, Jan. 2008. Appeared originally in EuroBachoT_EX 2007: the 17^th Annual Meeting of the European T_EX Users, Bachotek, Poland. [  Conference Proceedings ]

[3]

A. M. Sherif and H. A. H. Fahmy, “Meta-designing parameterized Arabic fonts for AlQalam,” TUGboat, vol. 29, No. 3, Oct. 2008. Appeared originally in the T_EX Users Group 2008 Conference, Cork, Ireland. [  Watch/Listen to Presentation ]

Try AlQalam

AlQalam is currently available as a debian package. Since that original version appeared we have been working to improve the fonts.

To get a feel of how the new preliminary fonts for AlQalam work, download the following zip file. It contains Metafont files for some of the Arabic letters together with an executable file which can be used to create beautiful Arabic sample words. You need three additional executable files: mf.exe, gftodvi.exe, and yap.exe which you can obtain through the MiKT_EX project page or the CTAN site.