• Overview
• AlQalam project.

Computer aided high quality documents and calligraphy

Computer users who are accustomed to the current state of affairs in word processing tools are missing the strength and flexibility of the text processing paradigm. In text processing, the writer focuses only on writing the material while the issues of the style of presentation are kept aside. Those style specifications that define how the document appears are usually prepared by professional typesetters in special style files for the user. Any person who published a journal or a conference paper most probably had used such style guidelines. Book publishers as well produce their own styles.

The idea of separating the authorship process from the typsetting process is how it used to be in the old days of printing books. It is also how it is recommended to be on the web by the World Wide Web Consortium , the body defining the specifications and guidelines for the markup languages used on the web.

My big interest in structured writing started when I published my first research work. I was completely dissatisfied by word processors of those days (mid 1990s) and I turned to the standard tool used by most researchers in my field: LaTeX which is a set of macros for the powerful typesetting engine TeX.

In general my research work is published in English but, as a native speaker of Arabic, I wanted to have the same performance of TeX for the Arabic language. I thus came to discover the TeX extensions ArabTeX and Omega . My interest in the arabic script and its uses for other languages drove me to learn a bit more about this and to start thinking about the most important book written in Arabic: The Quran.

The text of the Quran presents specific challenges to typesetters due to the extra marks included to define the fine details of how to utter every letter.

Related links

• Journal of Electronic Publishing
• Annotated bibligoraphy from Current Cites
• Electronic publishing bibliography
• TeX Users Group
• Comprehensive TeX Archive
• ArabTeX: multilingual computer typesetting
• Math Typesetting for the Internet
• Unicode and Multilingual Support in HTML, Fonts, Web Browsers and Other Applications
• True Type and TeX
• Fonts for the Unicode
• Internationalization (I18n), Localization (L10n), Standards, and Amusements
• Arabeyes
• Arabic alphabet and calligraphy
• Example on how to generate fonts available elsewhere

Several languages use the arabic script. Those include:

Arabic

Twenty two arab countries

Farsi

Iran

Pashto

Afghanistan

Urdu

Pakistan

Jawi (old Malay)

Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia

Ottoman Turkish

Turkey, North Iraq