Salaam All Arabeyes.org general mailing list participants. I would like to clarify herein what initiated this recent discussion thread regarding the Quran proposal. I and several friends have been working on encoding the Quran in Unicode for more than a year. In the process we met with Mr. Thomas Milo who has been doing research on the Arabic script for several decades and working on Arabic font solutions for almost two decades (DecoType). We shared a common interest that we would like to see a solution to the current problem of rendering the Quran from Unicode encoded text with uncomprimising precision. Fortunately we learned that this is exactly what he has been working on for a number of years and that he is very close to having a complete solution to accomplish this. We saw some samples of his font technology and was quite impressed by it. Here is a sample Quran PDF: http://69.55.224.165/2-33-35-39-48.pdf On the [EMAIL PROTECTED] both himself and us proposed a few changes to the Unicode Arabic block that would fix this issues with supporting the Quran in Unicode.
Meanwhile last week I found out that Arabeyes.org is working on a proposal to add new codepoints to the Unicode Arabic block and since we share the same interest, I decided to tell Tom about it. I asked him to criticize the proposal from a Unicode point of view. He sent me an email with the criticism that I asked from him. It was supposed to be a personal note and not a diplomatic criticism. I asked him whether I could forward this to the Arabeyes.org list and he preferred to prepare a more appropriate criticism rather than the personal note he sent me. So I invited him to join this mailing list. After having trouble signing on to the Arabeyes.org general mailing list, I asked him again whether I could simply forward his criticism to the proposal in the personal note that he sent me and he permitted me to do that. And this whole new thread of discussion regarding the Quran proposal started like that. Please recognize that his initial criticism was meant to be a personal note to me and not one prepared for this public mailing list so consequently it was received not very well. The discussion unfortunately turned into a prestige battle. There was also no need to turn this into an "Arab teaching a non-Arab the Arabic language" situation. Tom is very well versed in Arabic and a fluent speaker so it is not necessary to lecture him on the Arabic language, especially Quranic typography. Please let's correct this situation and let's start a fresh new discussion thread in a more formal manner without getting at the personal level. Let's solely discuss the technical merits of the said proposal and the existing criticism for it in an amicable manner and try to come to a mutual understanding in order to devise a joint proposal that details a uniform way to encode the Quran in Unicode - including any characters that need to be added. Insha-Allah we can accomplish this. Salaam, Mete _______________________________________________ General mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/general
