--- Forwarded Message from "Jackie M. Tanner" <[log in to unmask]> ---

>Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 09:29:50 -0500 (EST)
>From: "Jackie M. Tanner" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: ABC article on foreign language computing (fwd)


I thought the following article might be of general interest (see below,
for URL & article). I began inputting Chinese characters into the computer
10 years ago, but this is the first article I've seen from a major media
source on this issue. Though purporting to discuss non-Latin scripts, the
gist of the article is informative to anyone who communicates via
computer, whether Arabic, French, or Math. The Unicode encoding scheme
mentioned near the end of the article is being fully implemented
(finally!) in the next big releases of Windows and Macintosh operating
systems later this year. Unicode will allow multiple languages and scripts
(not to mention scientific and linguistic notation) to coexist within a
single computer document. Though of most noticeable benefit to non-Latin
scripts, one of Unicode's strongest supporters has been the European Trade
Commission because of its members' need to communicate with each other
(and someday they would also like to be able to type their unit of
currency, the euro :^).=20


For the original article, point your browser to:

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/scripts990127.html

Chris DeLucia
CBB Mellon
[log in to unmask]

---------- Forwarded message ----------

New Age for Old Scripts=20

 Software Developers Embrace Non-Latin Alphabets

 By Richard Martin ABCNEWS.com

 In the 10th century A.D., the Persian calligrapher Abu Ali Muhammad ibn
Muqlah standardized the principles for drawing Arabic letters. His designs
helped provide the basis for the flourishing of Islamic calligraphy and
culture.

 Now, more than 1,000 years later, a similar revolution is taking place
for the computer age. Along with other non-Latin alphabets such as Thai,
Chinese, Hebrew and certain Indian scripts, Arabic typefaces are being
brought into PCs and onto the Internet by a combination of ingenious
software developers and creative calligraphers.

 "We lost a lot of richness with the advent of computers, which have been
extremely limited in their typography," points out Alex Morcos, director
of Microsoft's complex scripts office. "They weren't able to reproduce
elaborate Arabic calligraphy, for instance. Now, with new powerful
software tools, we're trying to bring back this experience for users."

 For Muslims, particularly, it's not just a matter of being able to write
and read onscreen in their native language.

 "The need to embrace our traditional arts is more crucial now than ever,
because of our continuous exposure to the powerful media images of a
different culture," observes typographer Mamoun Sakkal, who has developed
Arabic calligraphic typefaces for computers.

 Fluid and Irreducible

 Arabic is especially difficult to reproduce in a fixed, typographic
manner because of its fluid nature. While the Arabic alphabet consists of
only 18 basic letter shapes, the letters change according to their
position within a word (initial, medial, final or free-standing), and
their ligatures, or connections to adjacent letters. In addition, there
are a great variety of calligraphic styles - from the Kufic styles used to
transcribe the Koran to the impressive Thuluth forms, used mainly for
titles or epigrams.

 Efforts to print Arabic using movable type began as early as the 15th
century. In the 20th century, the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo
launched a program to reform and modernize the Arabic language. Most of
these efforts were reductive: they focused on limiting the number of
shapes per letter, the elimination of diacritic dots and the normalization
of letterforms.

 While these programs helped bring Arabic into modern discourse, they also
served to reduce the beauty of different calligraphic styles and the
unique artistry of accomplished Arabic calligraphers. Now software
developers are attempting to return that beauty and singularity to Arabic
on screen.

Computerized Calligraphy

 Adobe recently released an Arabic-enabled version of Pagemaker called
Pagemaker 6.5 ME, while Quark Xpress has produced an ArabicXT extension
that enables the use of Arabic and Latin scripts simultaneously within the
same document. New Arabic typefaces, such as Decotype Professional Naskh,
have extended Arabic calligraphic forms into computer settings.

 Morcos is heading Microsoft's development of expanded non-Latin-script
capabilities for the Office suite of products - including functions that
allow the user to switch automatically to an Arabic keyboard and to
right-to-left typing seamlessly.

 A related problem is the one of dates: countries like China, Thailand and
Saudi Arabia use non-Western calendars. The new Microsoft software
automatically converts dates in the Western, or Gregorian calendar to the
appropriate non-Western date.

 In addition, an Israeli company called Accent Software has created a new
browser called Internet with an Accent that allows users to publish and to
view Web pages written in non-Latin alphabets. Internet with an Accent
also allows user to compose and read e-mail using non-Latin alphabets.

 More Bits =3D More Characters

 Even more important has been the advent of Unicode, an international
standard on which new software development can be based.

 Developed in the early '90s, Unicode allows the use and transmission of
16-bit character sets. A character set is simply the numeric values used
by a computer to transmit each letter in a text. Until the development of
Unicode, most character sets consisted of eight bits. For the English
alphabet, these character sets are identical on Macintosh and IBM-clone
computers; for other scripts, or even accented letters such as =E9, the
character sets are different.

 Those differences were exacerbated on the Internet, where for historical
reasons the number of characters in e-mail, for instance, has been limited
to about 90.

 Arabic, with its multiple letterforms, can employ up to 20,000
characters.

 Now, with Unicode-based software, and with e-mail programs that adhere to
the international specification known as MIME, Arabic speakers - along
with writers of Japanese, Chinese, Russian and other non-Latin alphabets -
should be able to communicate freely online and to create native-language
Web sites that reproduce hand-drawn calligraphy.

 "Muslims must learn to use the new technologies in publishing and
graphics," Sakkal says, "without replacing their visual consciousness and
heritage in the process."