Arabic-L:GEN:Transliteration Fonts: the Jaghbub package

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Mon 20 Dec 1999
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1) Subject: Transliteration Fonts: the Jaghbub package

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1)
Date: 20 Dec 1999
From: Albrecht Hofheinz <Hofheinz at wiko-berlin.de>
Subject: Transliteration Fonts: the Jaghbub package

While C. Buck's New World Transliterator is shareware, there is a
completely free package of high-quality transliteration fonts
available for the Macintosh. It has been used successfully for a
decade now in publications by Brill, Hurst, Northwestern University
Press, and others.

The package includes diacritic versions of Times, Palatino,
Helvetica, Geneva, Monaco, Courier, and New York. Both Type 1 and
TrueType versions are available. The package is easy to install and
use, and can be used for Arabic, Persian, Turkish, various African
languages, and others.

Notice that there are are also several tools available for sorting,
de-diacriticizing, converting from other fonts (such as METimes) to
Jaghbub, and dealing with diacritic database files found on the Web
(such as the Melvyl catalog).

To download, visit

http://www.hf-fak.uib.no/Institutter/smi/ksv/Jaghbub.html


Here is an excerpt from the description:

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The Arabic Macintosh: Transliteration
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The Jaghbub font package

This is a set of fonts for use in Middle Eastern languages
transliterated to the Latin scripts. They have the most common
diacritics used in transliteration of Arabic and Persian in various
transliteration / transcription formats. The fonts are modifications
of standard Times, Helvetica and Palatino, and will print on any
printer in a quality similar to those fonts. Included in the package
are keyboard layouts to facilitate typing in these fonts, and various
tools based on them.
There are three TrueType fonts in the normal range of Roman, Bold,
Italics and BoldItalics. They are:

*	Jaghbub, which is based on Times
*	Koufra, which is based on Palatino
*	Bairut, which is based on Helvetica.

In addition, there are four screen fonts which are in bitmaps only.
They are more prosaically named

*	Courier D
*	Geneva D
*	Monaco D
*	New York D.

They are mainly there because e.g. Times, and thus Jaghbub, is not
very pleasant to work with on screen. All these seven fonts share the
same characters in the same layout, so that a text written in one
font can be changed to any other among the seven with all diacritics
intact.
In the following the complete set is described as the "Jaghbub package".
The fonts contain these characters:

*	The standard A-Z character set and normal European
diacritics, unchanged from the origin font. Thus these fonts may be
used for normal non-tranliteration texts as well.
*	SDTHZ with dot under (all in upper and lower case)
*	DT with line under
*	G with dot above
*	G with caron (small v above)
*	H with curly line below (for German translit. of kh)
*	AIUEO with macron (line above)
*	Dotless i / Dotted I
*	Hamza
*	'Ain
*	Schwa (upside-down e)
*	Yumushak G (= g with breve; curve above) *

Additionally, these non-width diacritics may be used with any
following character:

*	Dot below
*	Dot above (low position for lower case, high for upper case letters)
*	Macron (low / high)
*	Non-width accent aigu / grave (low / high)
*	Caron
*	Cedille
*	Two dots below *
*	Line under *

(* = currently in Jaghbub 4.1 only)

With the fonts follows a keyboard layout that places the diacritics
in relatively logical places. E.g., for typing emphatic s, press the
Option key + s; for long a, press Option + a, etc.


Extras for Jaghbub etc files

These fonts actually have a long history, the current version is
"Generation 4". Generation 1 dates back to 1987. In the course of
these years, I have entertained myself by trying to make some tools
for working with Jaghbub files. I have included some of them as
"freebies" in the jaghbub.extras.sea file. They are not required for
running the fonts, they are only there if you want to play with them.
One problem concerns using texts written in Jaghbub in catalogues
that sort titles alphabetically. The computer does not know that the
'h/dot under' in Muhammad should be treated as an h. Either it will
divide the word, and sort it as Mu Ammad, or it will put the h/dot
after Z, sorted as Muzzammad.
I tried solving this by asking a colleague to change the system
resource in the Mac operating system that organizes sorting, so that
the h/dot is sorted as normal h. This works, but unfortunately very
few programs use the System's sorting resources, neither FileMaker or
Word does that. So for these programs, it was a wasted effort. But
HyperCard, Excel and some other programs will sort according the
selected sorting resource. Since it was of limited value, I have not
upgraded this resource to System 7, it will only work under System 6.
You must be able to use ResEdit to install it.
With FileMaker Pro, however, you got the ability to choose which
national alphabetic order you sort your database after. So, I created
a "Diacritic nation" and made a sorting order for this, where again
h/dot is sorted as h, a/macron as a, ain/hamza ignored etc. It will
work for FileMaker Pro 1 and 2.x. Again, installation by ResEdit.
There are two orders, one locally here which adds diacritics to the
Scandinavian sorting order, and one based on the US English order. US
users can ignore the first of the two. The file is called XLATs.
Another issue was compatibility with other users. I edit a journal
which is printed in Jaghbub, and I occasionally get articles written
in some other fonts that contain diacritics. To help me in dealing
with this, I use a tool which translates the diacritics of these
fonts to the Jaghbub system (I did not create the tools, a colleague
here in Bergen did). I have included two of them, one called MidEast
Times > Jaghbub and the other ME Geneva > Jaghbub; each for the font
by that name (There is apparently also a ME Times font, different
from MidEast Times, that follows the ME Geneva setup: Use that filter
for this). Drop any text-only file on top of this utility (or
"paradoid"; Paradigm-let), and it will create a new one called
[name].PD with the converted text. It only works on "text" files,
i.e. saved as "text only" under your word processor's "Save As"
option, so formatting is normally lost. But I include it here for
those who wish to use it.
Sometimes, diacritics must be removed, i.e. when a bibliography
written in Jaghbub is to be included in an e-mail message or sent to
a user who does not have the font. Another similar conversion tool,
Remove diacritics will do that. In the Jaghbub Extras folder, I also
include another couple of these small converters, one (Remove diacs /
rtf) will remove the Jaghbub codes as they appear in a RTF (Rich
Transfer) format, replacing them with non-diacritic characters. That
might be useful if you want to remove them from a formatted file
without losing the formatting - Export as RTF, drop it on top of this
converter, re-import the result into the word processor, and h/dot
under has become h.
Another, experimental, converter allows you to use transcription in
Web documents. It is based on the assumption that you create your
file (containing Jaghbub or one of the other fonts) in a word
processor, then export it in RTF format and use the well known
"rtftohtml" programme to convert it to a Web (HTML) document. In that
case, pass the RTF document through the Jaghbub rtf > html ASCII
paradoid before passing the result through "rtftohtml". This inserts
character codes which, when put on a Web server and read in Netscape
or MacWeb, will display Jaghbub characters correctly. Of course, the
user must then choose one of the Jaghbub fonts as his display font in
his/her own browser, so it requires an effort on the reader's part.
Equally of course, such pages will be pretty unreadable by anyone
with a PC, UNIX or on a Mac without the Jaghbub fonts. For this
reason, it probably still advisable not to use these diacritic fonts
on Web pages except in closely guarded circles; but anyway, this tool
will allow you to do it.
A third sometimes useful option is to use bibliographic references
downloaded from Melvyl or other on-line sources that can give
diacritics in Library of Congress codes (actually EBCDIC codes
surrounded by <>). A third paradoid (LC Diacritics) will convert such
a captured Telnet file from LC codes to Jaghbub.
The fourth may have its uses, although it was originally made as an
experiment or, perhaps, rather a toy. I played with the idea of
converting automatically from Arabic script to Jaghbub and back. From
Arabic to Jaghbub is fairly pointless, adding vowels to the result is
often more work than typing from scratch. But a Jaghbub file can be
converted the other way, to Arabic, with vowel marks deleted or
retained. For Arabic speakers, this may be equally pointless, but
many Western Arabists will type more quickly in English
transliteration than in the Arabic script on an Arabic keyboard. This
converter allows you to do this, enter the Arabic text in
transliteration using Jaghbub or one of its sisters, and then convert
the text into the Arabic script afterwards. Normally, such a
conversion cannot sort out all ambiguities, and will require some
cleaning up or at least proofreading afterwards. There is a separate
document that explains how the conversion process is done, and how
one most speedily can adapt the Jaghbub text for optimal conversion.
There are three files, Jaghb > Arab vowels goes from transcription to
Arabic script and retains the vowels; Jaghb > Arab NoVowels does the
same but deletes the vowels for a "cleaner", more normal Arabic text,
and Arab > Jaghb takes a crack at transliterating Arabic script to
Jaghbub; making some guesses at word forms to insert some vowels into
the text (mhmd = Muhammad etc.).

Knut S. Vikør


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Dr. Albrecht Hofheinz

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End of Arabic-L: 20 Dec 1999