ALI-BABA AND THE 4.0 UNICODE CHARACTERS New input and output concepts under Unicode

New input and output concepts under Unicode: Literary, Classical and Qurʾānic Arabic in Unicode involve more characters than the Arabic keyboard can accommodate. To enter sophisticated Arabic, Basis Technology and DecoType jointly developed an IME (input method editor): ALI (Arabic, Latin Input). When used at full power, ALI overstretches conventional font technology. Only DecoType’s Arabic Calligraphic Engine ACE, dubbed BABA for the occasion, handles elaborate ALI output. Therefore, the ALI-BABA pair points the way toward technology for dealing with Arabic text –from dialect transcriptions to the most complicated Qurʾānic quotation, covering all aspects of both abstract text level and rendering it to the highest possible standards of computer generated typography. RÉSUMÉ Des nouveaux concepts d’entrée et de sortie sous Unicode. L’arabe litérraire, classique et coranique requiert plus de caractères que le clavier de saisie arabe ne peut fournir. Pour saisir de l’arabe «sophistiqué», les socieétés Basis Technology et Decotype ont développé en commun un EME (Éditeur de méthode d’entrée) du nom de ALI (Arabic, Latin Input). Utilisé à tout son potentiel, ALI dépasse la technologie conventionnelle de fonte. Seule la technologie d’arabe calligraphique de DecoType (appelée ici BABA pour l'occasion), est en mesure de gérer efficacement la sortie de ALI. C’est pour cette raison que le couple ALI-BABA montre la voie vers une nouvelle technologie de composition arabe – des transcriptions dialectales jusqu’aux citations coraniques les plus complexes, en couvrant tous les aspects du niveau textuel abstrait et en affichant ce texte aux plus hauts standards de typographie informatique. Editor’s note: This article is rather different in style from the rest of the proceedings, as the author is not a TEX user, and prepared it with the tools he normally uses. Due to the nature of the material and pressing publication deadlines, we felt it best to print it this way, rather than take the considerable additional time that would have been necessary to typeset it in the customary fashion. 502 TUGboat, Volume 24 (2003), No. 3—Proceedings of EuroTEX 2003 ALI-BABA and the 40 Unicode Characters INTRODUCTION The extent of Arabic script The scope of Arabic or Islamic script is very broad indeed. By definition it covers the Islamic civilization, both in its historical development and in its geographical expansion. For literary and scholarly publishing all orthographical units or graphemes are relevant, as are all stages of the orthography of the Arabic language through the ages as well as all contemporary and historical orthographies of all other languages that use Arabic script or once did so. Computing in Arabic In its early stages in the '70s of the last century, Arabic computing was totally focused on contemporary governmental and short term business needs. As input a small subset of Arabic graphemes sufficed; output quality, let alone any typographical quality, was of no relevance. Against that background, Arabic computing took off with the typewriter metaphor: A very limited keyboard (input) with a matching set of glyphs (output). Precision of spelling (input) and typographical accuracy (output) in Arabic computing are primitive when compared with the quality of Arabic typesetting that it is now necessarily superseding. Figure 1: The typewriter metaphor – simplified input. Figure 2: The typewriter metaphor – simplified output: only two glyphs per key, using the shift mechanism that was designed to handle upper case in Latin script. TUGboat, Volume 24 (2003), No. 3—Proceedings of EuroTEX 2003 503