From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Jun 14 2005 - 14:32:17 CDT
Mete Kural wrote:
> Yup, you're right. We have some special needs to color parts of an Arabic word in a different color. One big need that I can identify for being able to color parts of an Arabic word is for Arabic language education materials. It would be an indispensible tool in Arabic language education. For example one could build a website or publish a book where there is a reading comprehension drill in which the root letters for all the words are colored in a specific color so that the student could easily identify the root of the word and look it up in the dictionary (for those who don't know Arabic dictionaries list words as entries under the root of the word unlike English dictionaries so if you can't figure out the root good luck finding the word in the dictionary). This would be neat because I notice that students of Arabic have a hard time identifying roots of words at first. Or another use would be to highlight certain morphological components of a word in a different color to
di!
> stinguish them. For instance color the se- prefix for future tense in blue and color the al- definitive article in red, etc. There are more applications that I can think of but I hope you got the idea thus far.
I can't think of any reason why that shouldn't be done using graphics rather than live
text. In print material, it hardly matters at all how the text image is produced. On a
website, there are good arguments to be made in favour of using graphics for such material
rather than live text, simply because this is the only way to ensure that the
reader/student is seeing exactly the same thing as the author/instructor. Whenever one is
making reference to the *appearance* of text, saying e.g. 'Note the al- definitive article
in red', one doesn't want to be in a position of not knowing how the user's particular
combination of operating system, rendering engine and browser will handle that piece of text.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com Currently reading: Truth and tolerance, by Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger as was An autobiography from the Jesuit underground, by William Weston SJ War (revised edition), by Gwynne Dyer
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