An
Explanation about Arabic Character Sets
Remember ISO-8859-6 is Mac and Unix, CP-1256 is Windows
-
Poetry and Texts in Arabic
- Chaper 4 of Taha Husayn's "Al-Ayyaam"
- CP_1256
- Nizar Qabbani's Mata Yu`linun Wafat al-`Arab
åÊé êÙäæèæ èáÇÉ ÇäÙÑÈ
- ISO
8859-6
- CP 1256
- The Five Pillars of Islam ÈÇÈ áêåÇ Èæê Ùäêç ÇäÅÓäÇå
- ISO
8859-6
- CP 1256
- al-Jurjani's Risalah fi al-Wujud ÑÓÇäÉ áê ÇäèÌèÏ
- ISO
8859-6
- CP 1256
- Abu Hanifah's al-Fiqh al-Akbar Çäáâç ÇäÃãÈÑ
- ISO
8859-6
- CP 1256
- Mu@allaqat Umru' al-Qays åÙäñâÉ ÇåÑÆ ÇäâêÓ
- ISO
8859-6
- CP
1256
- Surat l-Baqara
- ISO
8859-6
- CP
1256
- I discovered these pages in one of the links in a network of Web sites
called the "Arab Ring". These pages had a !"<""Meta tag"">" declaring
the use of the 8859-6 charset which caused my browser on my Mac, Netscape
3.0, to override my default display options and display these pages in the
fonts selected for the "Western" option rather than my selected
"User-defined" option. Below are two links to a story typed in, in the
Arabic character set 8859-6. One with the
tag and one without. The one without, if you are using Netscape on a
Mac will display in whatever fonts you have selected in your display options
profile for the profile which you have currently selected. The one with the
!"<""Meta tag"">" tag, will, if you are using Netscape on a Mac,
display in whatever fonts you have selected for your "Western" display
options profile regardless of which profile you have currently selected.
These pages still have their original link into the home page that will take
you back into the "Arab Ring"
- Story
in Arabic, 8859-6, no meta tag
- Story in
Arabic, 8859-6, with the meta tag
- for completeness I have converted the 8859 in CP1256, and have copied up
two versions of the files in CP1256 to see if any of the Windows-based
browsers get overly happy about this
tag. These files can be browsed:
- Story in
Arabic, MicroSoft CP-1256, no meta tag
- Story in
Arabic, MicroSoft CP-1256, with the meta tag
The Arabic Book Center Catalog
-
- Unfortunately the Arabic Book Center in SF has finally closed down after
being open for more than 10 years and after changing hands at least three
times that I am aware of.
- The most recent owner, Salem Wali-Ali, is still selling his remaining
inventory by mail. He can be reached at
(swaliali@best.com)
and the URL for his Web page is = Arabic
Artext.
Some of the titles that were available when the store was
open are shown below.
-
Arab News Folder
- Al-Moharer
International - Home Page
- Al Manar Television
- AlHayat Home Page
- Asharq Al Awsat Home
Page
- Arabic 2000.com :
Arabic Newspapers and Magazines
- An-Nahar, the Lebanese
Nwespaper This site supports ISO-8859-6, the Arabic code page used by
Macs and Unix. Text is also presented in PDF format.
- QUDS PRESS SERVICE
- SRM Home
Page
-
Arab TV and Radio on the Web
- LBC TV news Live
- ANA Radio Live
- The Arab
Corner: Arab TV & Radio
- Tunisia National Radio,
The News
- Tunisia National TV, The News
-
Arabic Language Institutes
-
- ALIF program
- THE AMERICAN
LANGUAGE CENTER OF MARRAKESH
- International Language Institute in
Egypt I have studied Arabic under a lot of different folks, and I must
say that these guys are the best when it comes to teaching Arabic.
- Yemen Language Center International Office
Main Site
-
Arab film links
- Welcome to August Light
Productions
- http://www.georgetown.edu/sfs/programs/ccas/lookfilm.htm
- Arab Film
Festival:All Films
- Arab Film Distribution Home Page
- Arab Film Festival 1998
-
Teaching Arabic Links
- ATLAS
Symposium
- Languages and
Linguistics
- Al
Kitaab I
- American
Association of Teachers of Arabic
-
Arabic SW support on WWW
- Arabic Home Page
- Arabic
ISO 8859-6 Web page links
- Ayna? - How to view
Arabic pages (MAC)
- Diwan: Arabic Software for the Mac
- KnowledgeView home
- Language Systems for
Arabic and Islamic Software
- Nicholas Heer's Home
Page
- Products_frame
- ãÞÊØÝÇÊ This is
the Sakhr Software Company Web site in Egypt.
- Welcome to ayna - ÇçäÇ è ÓçäÇ Çäé Çêæ
- Xerox
Research Centre Europe: Arabic Input
-
Islamic Sites
- ISLAM ISLAM ISLAM
ISLAM
- THE ISLAM PAGE
- The Whole
Dunya Bookstore: All the Knowledge That Fits
-
Palestine Stuff
- Law Society Home Page
- Welcome to
Palestine!
- Center for Research
& Documentation
- PASSIA: Palestinian Academic Society
for the Study of International Affairs - JerusalemPASSIA: Palestinian
Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs
- UNSCO
- PALESTINE.ON.LINE
- ICAS MEPP Page
- PalEcon: Home Page
- PALESTINIAN
PALESTINE ARABIC ARAB
- Palestinian
Research Institutes and Centers
- PDIN/PRRN
Bulletin Board
- Personnel of
the United Nations Development Programme
- Personnel of
the United Nations Development Programme
- Gush Shalom
- recommended links
- Hebron Home Page
-
Iraq Activism
- Contents
- Salaam.org
- Iraq
Action Message Board
- ADC Ann Arbor
- Depleted Uranium Report
- Medicine for Iraq
- International
Action Center Homepage
- Salam Review
- Human Rights
Page
- Iraq's WWW Sites
- Iraq Action Coalition
-
Berber language and culture on the Web
- TAMAZIGHT,
un rŽpertoire de sites amazighes
- Berber Culture
Directory
-
University Mid-East Sites
- ACSweb American
University in Cairo
- Center for Middle Eastern
and North African Studies (CMENAS)University of Michigan
- MIT Arab
Student Organization's Home Page
-
Arabic Bookstores
- Arabic Book Center
- Leila Books
- Schoenhof's - Languages
- Smitskamp
Oriental Antiquarian Booksellers Homepage
Various Other Links
- Al Jadid - Arabic Culture
- American Institute for Yemeni
Studies
- THE AMERICAN-ARAB ANTI-DISCRIMINATION
COMMITTEE
- ArabNet
- Arabia. On. Line:
http://www.arabia.com
- ARAMedia
- Directory of
/public/heer/atexts
- Directory of
/public/heer/charset
- Encyclopaedia of the Orient
- Images of
Morocco
- Introduction to the Francophone
Literature of the Maghreb
- Lawrence of
Arabia Factfile - Home Page
- Qalam Index
- Welcome to
Arabnet
- Vellum Gallery: links
of interest to Calligraphers
- Welcome to Leb.Net
A word about Arabic Characters on the Internet
I guess people who
aren't well-versed in the ins and outs of Arabic Web-browsing might need a
little word of explanation. There are two incompatible character-set standards
in general use today for Arabic in the world of personal computing. One is ISO
8859-6, which is sort of based on what we used to call ASCII, with an agreed
upon 8-bit mapping for values between 128-255 which correspond to specific
Arabic symbols. This character-set mapping was agreed upon by the UN standards
committee which is currently called the International Standards Orgnization. It has a
vague resemblance to the 7-bit mapping that had been agreed upon by the now
disbanded UN committee CCITT (Commite Consultatif International pour Telephone
et Telegraph?) in its proposed standard for Arabic Interchange characters
defined in the document CCITT-52. By flipping on bit-8 of each Arabic character
in your file you can transfer your CCITT-52 characters into ISO-8859-6, more or
less. From perusing the literature I'm not even sure if CCITT-52 ever saw much
use.
The ISO 8859-6 character set is the one used by Unix systems and by the
Macintosh Arabic Language kit. As long as you have Arabic support on your
computer AND you are using a Macintosh or Unix, you can view ISO-8859-6 Web
documents by selecting an Arabic font inside of Netscape and things will, more
or less, be alright.
Microsoft with its killer market share, however, chose not to follow the
ISO-8859-6 character set and invented one of their very own, which they called
CP-1256. I find this rather puzzling. They followed the ISO 8859-n (5 or 7, I
think) character for Hebrew, but they invented their own, CP-1251, for Cyrillic
and their own non-standard character mappings for a couple of other non-Latin
alphabet orthographies. My only guess is that they were trying to make it a bit
more difficult for folks in those countries who might want to use a
non-Windows-based machine. What with Microsoft's current bail-out of Apple, I
don't know how much weight I can give to this explanation.
Using Windows you can with either Netscape or the Microsoft Windows 95
browser (I forget its name) read any Arabic documents created with the CP-1256
Arabic character set, by selecting your Arabic font under the appropriate
Options' menu. Sakhr Software in Egypt has a
plug-in for Netscape and their own browser I believe, which will let you read
the ISO-8859-6 Arabic character set using the Windows operating system on an
Intel processor based machine. There are some other browsers for Windows which
can read ISO-8859-6, but unfortunately neither your vanilla Netscape nor the
Microsoft browser will display Arabic documents written using ISO-8859-6.
So, now we have two different and incompatible (Arabic diglossia in the world
of DataCom?) character sets for Arabic on the Web. As a Macintosh user, I put
most of my stuff up using 8859-6, and then use a little utility to convert my
8859-6 into Microsoft's CP-1256 character mapping. This means that I don't get
to see my CP-1256 documents and that makes it difficult for me to catch any
mistakes. At this point in time I don't see any choice but to put up all
documents in both formats and let the user choose which format they are using.
The other choices which people have opted for are to:
- scan their Arabic documents as JPG files. This side-steps the issue of
which character set to use, but these image files are large and take a long
time to download. Another major drawback is that you cannot search these files
for text strings.
- put their Arabic documents onto the Web as Adobe Acrobat image files
(PDF). Again the images take a long time to download, cannot be searched and
to top it all off you need to have the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader,
which goes through about three SW revision releases a year.
- create java applets to display their Arabic documents. My version of
Netscape Navigator (3.01) on the Macintosh, does not display any of the
implementations of this that I have seen. My version of Netscape Communicator,
runs out of memory (32 megabytes), before it can download the entire applet,
which causes my machine to crash. I don't consider this an option which is
usable to me.
To make things worse, in my not so humble opinion, there
is a third character set in the works called Unicode which is not compatible
with either of the current character sets. Unicode is also a 16-bit character
mapping which will double the size of all character transfers, if not the size
of all data files. I think most users do not want to be forced to convert all of
their existing character data and double their disk usage at the same time.
Unicode has been stalled in various talk-only committees for about 5 years now.
Interestingly enough, all three of these character sets preserve the Latin
character mapping originally used by the ASCII standard.
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