AlQalam for typesetting traditional Arabic texts
Hossam A. H. Fahmy · 2006
hfahmy (at) arith dot stanford dot edu AlQalam (“the pen ” in Arabic) is our freely available system intended for typesetting the Qur’an, other traditional texts, and any publications in the languages using the Arabic script. From a typographical point of view, the Qur’an is one of the most demanding texts. However, there is a long historical record of excellent quality materials (manuscripts and recent printings) to guide the work on a system to typeset it. Such a system, once complete, can easily typeset any work using the Arabic script, including those with mixed languages. 1 Characteristics of Arabic typography The Arabic alphabet has been adopted for use by many languages in Africa and Asia, including Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Jawi, Kashmiri, Pashto, Punjabi, Sindhi, Urdu, and Uyghur. The Arabic script is also used for a number of other languages either to