Dear list members,
I thought the following message from Prof. Knut Vikor might be of interest to our community.
With best wishes,
Arnoud Vrolijk
-----Original Message-----
From: H-NET List on Islamic Lands of the Medieval Period [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Letizia Osti
Sent: dinsdag 1 april 2008 12:59
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: H-MEM: Arabic transliteration, from old to Unicode
From: "Knut S. Vikør" [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 01 April 2008 11:21
This is part an announcement, part request, concerning transliteration fonts.
Until recently, most of us had to use various specialized fonts for Arabic transliteration, fonts that mostly our colleagues or publishers did not have. Now that there is a standardized solution ("Unicode fonts"), we are asked to use these instead, and we should; it is great step forward.
However, that leaves the question of what to do with our old documents, or documents we still receive from colleagues using old-style fonts we do not posess. To help solve this, I have made up a set of "macros" for Microsoft Word 2004/Mac and NisusWriter Pro, which convert transliteration characters from some 30-40 different pre-Unicode fonts I found, to Unicode. Run the macro, and the old document becomes Unicode-based. These macros can be dowloaded from <http://www.smi.uib.no/ksv/convert.html>
That was the announcement. The request is that my information about several of these fonts is sketchy, and I have not been able to test many of them in "real-life" situations with actual documents. Thus, if the issue sounds interesting, I would ask people who think this may be useful, and who have documents written in some of the old fonts listed, to try out the macros and report back to me errors, mistakes, or failures, so that I can improve the tools for future use.
The fonts currently covered are: Abbas, afroas, AHT, al-Arial, ArabTransLit, Assur, Beyrut, Bloomington, Bock, DMGTms, GalilTimes, HaifaTimes, islamicstudies, IslwTimes, Jaghbub / Bairut / Koufra, JAIS-font, ME Times / ME Geneva, MidEast Times, Nebe, New Baskerville, NWT, New World, Pamuk, Semitic Transliterator, Sima, Tabriz, Times Beyrut Roman / OI-Beirut, Times New Arabic, Times New Arabic Roman, Times New English Roman, TimesEncycBrillRoman, TimesTL, Timur / Helvan and UrmiTimes.
Further fonts can be added if I receive information about them, please contact me if you have a suggestion. The Word macros are made for Macintosh Word, I would also like to know how far they work in Word for Windows with the various fonts. Possibly only small adjustments would be required.
Knut S. Vikør
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