Mission

Arabetica.com is at heart an educational information technology project, but as with many other ventures of such nature, it is also a project of other directly related fields. The main goal of the Arabetica.com project is to experiment with alternative Arabetic information technology methods to provide scripts users and learners more options on computerized systems and platforms, and most importantly, to address the challenges of literacy, education, economics, technology, globalism, competition, and typography that are facing these scripts today.

Background

Arabetic scripts include a wide range of scripts derived or related to the original Arabic script, including for example Urdu, Kurdish, Pashtu. Many of these scripts are used today in a vast land extending from China to the heart of Africa. But in our modern day "global village", where constant immigration and people movements are redefining countries and cities, Arabetic scripts are also heavily used by millions in the heart of the western world. And when adding the Islamic religious dimension wherein the Arabic script is the reference script of the Quraan, the user base of these scripts may potentially extend to every corner on earth.

The complexity of Arabetic scripts is, without a doubt, a major factor affecting negatively the educational process outcome in countries with overwhelming usage of these scripts. It is also a discouraging factor for new learners. But the good news is that this complexity is more a result of missing evolutionary opportunities than a fixed intrinsic feature of these scripts. With today's decisive role of technology, especially after the rise of the internet and global communication networks, a new evolutionary opportunity is clearly present. Economics defines and re-defines scripts. Education being the backbone of economics is more and more dependent on technology. People are typing and keying letters and words today far more than handwriting them. Modern technology is mature enough to both address the real complexities of the Arabetic scripts and to eliminate gradually their unnecessarily added ones. In a natural healthy environment, technology and scripts interact and adapt to each other needs mutually.

About Our Projects

Arabetic.com is a research and development project with a mission to implement the vision of its project manager, Saad D. Abulhab, who has worked since 1998 to introduce much needed new options to handle Arabetic scripts on computerized systems, utilizing today's prevailing technologies. A major goal for Arabetica.com projects is to create basic working utilities and tools for both users and producers to experience first hand the advantages and benefits of options availability on all levels. But the ultimate ambitious goal for this venture is to provide robust education and communication modules that can to be utilized by users and organizations on daily basis.

Addressing Arabetic scripts computing and its educational and economical implications can not be accomplished without addressing Arabetic typography. We believe that the minimum requirements on the Arabetic font model level and on the application level, as implemented today, need to be practically redefined. This is why our projects address both the dominating traditional font model and an open font model, like the Mutamathil type style which was also introduced few years ago by the founder of the Arabetica.com project.

Our Arabetic Webpad and Future Projects

The only utility now proudly available to the public on arabetica.com, thanks in part to a grant by the CUNY Research Foundation, is our Arabetic Webpad Java utility. This utility offers unique features not available today on any other platforms. It was designed to demonstrate our technological vision regarding font model utilization, ordering, and text input methods. In this utility we offer users the opportunity to utilize both traditional and non traditional, calligraphic, font models. They have the option to order text in both directions using today's prevailing glyph substitution (shaping) method or NAIM™, Natural Arabetic Input Method, a non shaping input method made available by Arabetics™. For now, this utility offers five online keyboards choices for Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Kurdish, Pashtu, and Somali.

Read more about our Arabetic Webpad or just go to the Arabetic Webpad page to experience it first hand.

Depending on funds availability, we are planning to work on more related projects in the future. One such project may be to make this utility more robust and inclusive one by offering more word processing features for example. Or, to emphasize the educational benefits of utilities like Arabetic Webpad, we are planning to offer it in more scripts and languages. And since communication is the essence of script usage, we are planning to offer much more user communication features in this utility. Also depending on fund availability, we have plans to introduce major language and script learning tools, based on the vision of this and related projects. To facilitate our future projects we will need to conduct multilingual detailed comparative research surveys to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages, both of our new models and the traditionally available ones, for users in educational or other environments.