Al salamu alaikum All
Finally I found some minutes to write to AlQalam. I sent a message from a while promising all members of QuranTypesetting that I will write about AlQalam project especially for new members. I asked Dr. Hossam for a message describing our mission from scientific/technical point and he 'also' promised forthat message but as you all know, Ramadan came and we all are busy now.
What Is AlQalam? and AlQalam history:
It's all about Quran, Sunna and our heritage. AlQalam is a Typesetting system specialized for typesetting Quran with the 10 recitations "Qiraat" and all marking systems (Mashareqa, Maghareba and Imam).
This project was started by Dr. Hossam Ali Fahmy from Cairo university. The idea begun with Eng. Hossam Fahmy who was an Electronics Engineer graduated from Cairo university in 90's.
He carried the Idea with him when leaveing to Stanford university where he made his Ph.D. After his return to Cairo, Dr. Hossam continued working on the project(wasn't called AlQalam yet) and fered the task as one of three projects for the academic year 2004-2005. The first group that had the honor to join this project consists of 6 engineers who I was one of them.
They worked on the project for 2004-2005 and called the project internally "Hossam-3". Hossam-3 was
granted Excellent degree as a graduation project. Hossam-3 group then found this yahoogroup and called it "hossam-3@yahoogroups.com" which was renamed to "QuranTypesetting@yahoogroups.com" and the group then was called AlQalam. At the same time Dr. Hossam left to work on NTU Nanyang Technology University in Singapore and he continued work there with another 2 new members Ainunnajib and Pradipta who joined the project on 2005-2006. The project (Now AlQalam) continued evolution.Hossam-3 group then introduced the project to the students of the Faculty of Engineering-Cairo university where another group joined AlQalam and Continued the work. Those was Abdul Nasser's group.
Now AlQalam consists of NTU's group, Nasser's group, Zareef's group and Members of QuranTypesetting group members in addition to Ameer Sherif who is working on his master Thesis also as a part of AlQalam.
Technically what is AlQalam?
At first there was no specific platform or framework to use in developing AlQalam. we looked at the open source text editors and word processors to use. We tried OpenOffice, Emacs, AbiWord among some other opensource packages. At the end we selected TeX/LaTeX as our base system. Dr. Hossam introduced TeX/LaTeX to us for the first time late on 2004 and AlQalam group(s) found TeX/LaTeX to be the most suitable package for our purbose. You can find more about our decision to use TeX/LaTeX on the files
section on the group, In folder AlQalam 0.1, the file Main_pdf.zip this is our paper and contains alot of information.
First group worked on developing Omega, Yannis Haralambous's multilingual package, but we had not that good results usnig the free package (including the font omarab). After some research we took the decision to use ArabTeX. So hossam-3 group and nasser's group in addition to Ainun and dipa worked using ArabTeX for about 2 years and Al Hamdu Lillah we got good results. These results will be uploaded In Shaa Allah to the files section of the group soon. But we feeled reaching the limits of using ArabTeX after the last package produced by Nasser's.
On this time Dr. Hossam returned to Egypt and the group was together again. On that time we introduced AlQalam on the Language Engineering conference
in Ain Shams University. We also participated EuroTeX2006 in Hungary. EuroTeX's presentation also is in the files sectio of the group.
After coming back from EuroTeX, Dr. Hossam and the group took the decision to Look for another TeX/LaTeX package other than ArabTeX. Maybe Omega, Alif, Arabi or other package.
Nasser uploaded the last package to the files section. And I here invite All of you to inroduce yourselves to your brothers in order to work tpgether on AlQalam.
I focused along last year on helping Nasser's group to make better graduation project so I served as a consultant for them :) after that I tried to start building AlQalam's
web site but this task may be postponed later. Now I think I can focus on working again in developing AlQalam (the package) hoping that Allah accept our work for serving Quran
Waiting for your replies
Ahmad Zareef
شربت العلم كاسا بعد كاس ...... فما نفد الشراب ولا
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