ALI-BABA and the 4.0 Unicode Characters - The Ideal Arabic Working Environment

Thomas Milo - President, DecoType, and Arabic Linguistic Consultant, Basis Technology

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Literary, Classical and Qur'anic Arabic in Unicode involve more characters than the Arabic keyboard accommodates. To enter sophisticated Arabic, Basis Technology and DecoType jointly developed an IME (input method editor): ALI (Arabic, Latin Input). When used at full power, ALI overstretches conventional font technology. Only DecoType's Arabic Calligraphic Engine ACE, dubbed BABA for the occasion, handles elaborate ALI output. Therefore, the ALI-BABA pair points the way toward technology for dealing with Arabic text - from dialect transcriptions to the most complicated Qur'anic quotation, covering all aspects of both abstract text level and rendering it to the highest possible standards of computer generated typography.