Dear Nadim, Salam. The Zekr project is a try to ease the use of Quran on everyone's desktop. It is easy, small, simple and cute! It is written with this idea, and I tried hard to make something for real *end-users* (not expert developers). I think this is the most important point of difference between Zekr and qtquran. qtquran is written for Linux users (who are supposed to be of a little expertise), while Zekr basically addresses Windows users. It has a quite simple installation for a novice user.
I'd seen Arabeyes' qtquran after the 0.1 release of the Zekr project (more that 1 year ago) after finding a port of that project on Java platform (http://kuran.sf.net). About the translations, there is a note in about dialog box stating that this software is released without any warranty. You are right, and it is a good idea to have such a disclaimer on the installation part. I should say that even main Quran text file has some typos (addressed ono Zekr mailing list). Although I had changed the whole Quran text for 0.3.0 release there found to be at least 2 typos (trivial ones with diacritics) in the newest version. I didn't used quran text used for earlier versions of qtquran, because found the one for the Zekr more precise (rich in diacritics). The newer version (if I'm correct) uses some special Unicode characters which are not supported yet on Windows (and there are very few fonts supporting that). I use Cp1256 encoding for all the Quran text. It is much smaller in size (each character is 8 bit) and JRE 1.4.1+ supports that. The Quran text charset can be changed through an external configuration file. The translations are all free to use whatever encoding Java SE supports. I don't know why someone shall read Zekr's Quran text using Vim/Emacs, when there exists graphical editors ;) I think it is good also to talk a bit about licensing. There are two translation (Makarem[fa] and Kuliev[ru]) which are permitted to use for the Zekr projects (by asking their authors). The Shakir[en] translation is also available in the public release of the Zekr, since: 1. this transltioan is publicly available every where on the Internet, 2. I think it is more than 25 year old corpus. Other resources are available on resource page (http://siahe.com/zekr/resources.html). This could be a good discussion for addressing issues on the two projects, and try to have better community on the projects. Best regards. On 7/12/06, Nadim Shaikli <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
--- Mohsen Saboorian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This release has a number of new features over version 0.2.0 and works > fine on Win32/Mac/Linux. > a.. Quran translation: different translations of the Quran can be > added to Zekr > b.. Theme: you can customize your own theme or use 2 built-in themes > of the Quran browser. Themes also can be added to the app dynamically. > c.. 4 different view layouts (Quran only, translation only, mixed and > separate) > d.. Translation for search results > There are 3 built-in translations (Shakir: English, Makarem: Farsi, and > Kuliev: Russian). Please see release notes for more details on the release, > or Zekr plan page for the project road map. http://freshmeat.net/projects/zekr Sorry for the late reply and Barek Allah feek for this great work; since I'm a bit removed from Arabeyes' Quran project (M.Yousif ?) and having seen some of the screenshots I can see that there is great commonality between the two efforts. Could you please comment in that regard ? Have you looked at the code that is housed on Arabeyes [1] ? Where do the two projects differ/diverge ? Regarding translations -- have you contacted anyone that was willing to certify translations as valid/authentic (I'm unaware of an entity out there that does this currently) ? How do you maintain the data's integrity ? Are there are precautions in-place to make sure that the data used is the intended proper one (what I'm thinking about is someone maliciously creating a LiveCD say with modified data content claiming its authentic, any way to protect against that ?). If you are using the unicode encoding/charset (are you ?) have you addressed some of the Unicode character issues which M.Yousif had posted about on the 'general' mailing-list ? If you are using a "self-mapped" or non-standard encoding have you considered Unicode ? In other words, will anyone using mlterm/vim/emacs/etc be able to properly see all the data files' contents on a simple terminal sans the GUIs ? I'd love to hear how Zekr and Arabeyes' Quran project differ and what sort of effort is involved in bringing them closer together to better utilize our community's limited resources. [1] http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Quran Thoughts/comments/ideas ? - Nadim
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