Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Motivation
Today, computers, Internet, mobiles, and tablets are widely used by millions of people all over the world, the processing power, storage, display capabilities, and various connectivity ability of these devises made people depend on them in their life style, and reduce many numbers of every day belongs; for example in one devise you can find radio, mobile, compass, GPS, and electronic library as well. The most important book for Muslims is the Holly Qur’an, It’s originally saved by heart by listening, and reciting. It is a miracle itself [1]. You can find it in every mobile, computer, thousands of websites [2], and tablet applications. They do not want to read the Holly Qur’an only, but they also need to search, translate, and explication.
Muslims do not have any problem in having many explications, or translations [4], but the most important thing is that the Holly Qur’an must be written correctly and precisely, which means that any difference in any character or even diacritic is not acceptable at all. So any software developer has to compromise between precision and software feature. This is achieved either by presenting the Holly Qur’an as images without searching ability or presenting it as a text with taking into consideration a precision risk.
The Holly Qur’an is written in Arabic; which consists of
• letters,
• diacritics (التشكيل),
• punctuation (علامات الوقف) ,
• control conventions (اصطلاحات الضبط) –there are more than 30 control conventions at the end of the Holly Quran,
• Marginal information such as sura (chapter) name, goz’(part) number, page number, hizb, and quarter number.
Regarding the hard copy of the Holly Qur’an we used Mushaf authorized from Al-Azhar, Islamic Research academy, and General Department for Research writing & Translation, Authorization date the 8th of September 1999, and 28/5/1420 Hijri to Dar Al-Maarifa. This Mushaf is 15 lines per page, where each page ends with end of an Aya.
Regarding the soft copy of the Holly Qur’an we downloaded it from www.tanzil.net (Uthmani). This copy was verified to match Medina Mushaf [5].
