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--- 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."