Intelligent digitisation of Arabic characters

There are a number of initiatives aimed at the introduction of the digital age to the Arab world. A leading company in this area is Sakhr Software, who have just launched their programme (SakhrMedia) to support the learning process in local educational institutions. The objective is to meet the greater requirement of computerising both the techniques and the knowledge which has thus far been developed alongside traditional platforms. In this regard efforts have been made to computerise Arabic typography and language (often referred to as Arabisation). This is vitally important not just to meet everyday needs, but also to harmonise for the Arab audience interaction with worldwide accepted application packages, as well as the Internet. The purpose of this paper is to revisit the digitising process (sometimes called rasterisation) of the most valued aspects of a language, its character set. Using a geometric modelling approach, a computer system has been developed to extract and store features of Arabic fonts. Such a process lends itself to fast reconstruction and rendering of characters, and for text recognition techniques. The discussion provides an insight into the workings of the system, with view to assisting the digitisation process for Arabic