Adil Allawi

Adil Allawi has been working in the field of multilingual computing for the past 20 years. He started with writing bilingual software for one of the first implementations of Arabic on a personal computer and has continued into the fields of word-processing, desktop publishing, and text rendering on small devices. Adil's largest project was rewriting a high-end DTP application first to handle both Arabic and English and later to work with all international languages. Adil is the Technical Director and lead engineer of Diwan Software Limited.

Bringing Typography to the Masses - Diwan's role in the publishing revolution and beyond

The paper will focus on Diwan's role in bringing Arabic typography to the personal computer. Back in 1982, if one wanted to publish an Arabic book or a pamphlet, your options were pretty limited. If you did not have much money you would have to hand typeset page after page on an Arabic typewriter. If you could afford a bit more you would go to a typesetting company and have the whole book retyped into a proprietary system. If you wanted to publish an international daily newspaper, forget it, unless you had the million pounds a year it cost to fax newspaper sized pages around the world. It was out of this need to publish books cheaply that Diwan was born in 1982. From its birth Diwan continued at the forefront of the publishing revolution.

The story begins with simple word processing and the problems of getting Arabic to print on devices that only supported English. Getting Arabic to draw on a computer screen was one thing, but putting Arabic on paper was another problem that required innovative solutions. Next, the talk will address the first Arabic desktop publishing application and how that revolutionized the newspaper industry. We will concentrate on how Diwan worked on making Arabic fonts accessible using a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-iswhat-you-get) interface and the benefits that this brought to newspaper publishing.

The paper culminates in describing the way that Diwan brought the tradition of Arabic calligraphy to the computer. How we created calligraphic styles like Naskh, Thulth and Farsee on the computer and how correct Quranic calligraphy was defined. I will conclude with a brief talk about where the computer typography technology currently stands and where I think it will go in the future.