Salam all,
I would like to bring attention to the use of harakat (fat'ha, kasra, thamma etc.) and propose a solution to what I see is a major problem. In the last several years, I noticed that TV news reporters make a lot of mistakes that sound like grammatical mistakes, as for instance starting a verb in passive voice with a fat'ha, e.g. "yaktobo" instead of "yoktabo". While reading news papers, I found myself having to read past the first few words in a sentence to realize that I made a mistake. More generally, I noticed that electronic text in arabic tend to have less tashkil than hand-written one. Regardless of the fact that arabic is so sofiticated and you can read it without tashkil, tashkil definitely improve the speed of reading and avoid confusion with regard to word meanings. But why is tashkil not used to often as it should be on computers? Actually, the answer is simple: it's not easily accessible to do so, most keyboards don't even show the keys for harakat, so most people don't know how to put a haraka on a letter in MS Word, for example. So, I started dreaming up a solution to help anyone put tashkil on text. 1- A word processor (e.g. openoffice.org or MS word) should have a Tool bar that shows icons harakat which when clicked simply insert a haraka where the cursor is located. 2- An applet may be run, independently of any application. The applet should show a list of icons, one for each haraka, and when clicked the applet inserts the active haraka in the window. I personnally like the 2nd solution and I am working to implement "xharaka" (or any other name we choose). An XWindows applet that displays a table to icons (in the manner of xclock), and when an icon is clicked the mouse cursor changes (in the manner of xkill), when a window is clicked, X inserts the selected character (haraka) into the input stream to that window. This is still in the project phase. and I want to say this: I am not fluent at all in X programming. I have no idea how long it will take me to complete this, and I would gladly pass it on to someone else with good X skills. So, please step forward. Cheers, -Karim ===== Karim Elaagouby _______________________________________________ General mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/general
