Travels With Winnie, Mostly Eastwards
15 \u1E62Ṣafar 1422
Allow us to introduce our good frie..., er, that is to say, our formidable acquaintance, Winnifred, Ninth Baronness Redmond. Here is her calling card:
Her Ladyship is variously referred to as "Word 2000", "Word 2K", "WinWord 9" and so on and so forth. We ourselves call her Winnie Nono, at least when her back is turned and we are not so vexed with her latest refractoriness as to wish to speak more disrespectfully or profanely.
But seriously, اما بعد, this is the index page for a collection of documents executed by Winnie and us in conjunction with the Arabic language and things of that sort. All the documents pointed to here assume that you possess a copy of Winnie herself and also have set up Internet Explorer 5 to do Arabic. If the two words right after "But seriously" at the start of this paragraph don't look like Arabic, you can fix that by going to
http://zamsoft.tripod.com/mwa/index.htm
and following the instructions there. The documents collected here will be either HTML files or DOC files. But they won't work with just any browser and any word processor. You have to have IE5 (with Arabic Text Support) and µsoft Word For Windows 9. Accept no substitutes. Don't say we didn't warn you.
One more preliminary point. The date in the second line of the header to this page is written that way on purpose. The little square box ought to be U+1E62 or #7778 or the character at the cursor in the following image from a screen shot of UniPad:
Especially it ought to be that in a font called "Lucida Sans Unicode." Yet that font does not seem to run to the "Latin Extended Additional" characters, and so you get the little square box. Since that box means nothing in particular, we have prepended the "Unicode" designation, so you know for sure what month this is in the lunar calendar.
If perchance you don't know what month it is, try
http://www.dynamical-systems.org/kal/calendar.cgi?-i
If you know of fonts that include \u1E62, you might perhaps be good enough to share your knowledge with us.
Where to start? Well, why not with the file we just finished working on? And is not dawn a sensible مطلع of departure? So, then,
(1) Surah 89 In 12.5 Languages
Now there is a document which ought to give your Redmondware a thorough polyglot workout. And mention of حسن المطلع naturally suggests that
should come next, especially after E. G. Browne's commentary gets copied into it so it begins to make some sort of sense. And now to bring all our Oriental poetry projects together in one place, add at this juncture
(2b) E. J. W. Gibb on تجنيس ِ عثمانى
and
(2c) Arabic 240 of 1972-3 أمن ازديارك
(Did we ever mention that the whole Diwan of المتنبّي seems to be present at AJEEB? In Windows Arabic! But acquiring it one ode at a time would be a bit tedious.)
Well, that's enough by way of a fancy muqaddimatory spiel. The main reason we are here today is so we can gather up all those DOC files پرويز never got around to reading and see what they amount to. Hmmm....KAKA DOC 33,792 04-02-01 10:43p kaka.doc MASSAC~1 DOC 19,968 04-02-01 8:00p MASSAC~1.DOC --> massac_1.doc (for UNIX) MASSARAB DOC 19,968 04-02-01 8:34p massarab.doc MCROW001 DOC 32,768 04-01-01 2:26p mcrow001.doc MNQDH002 DOC 32,768 04-01-01 1:59p mnqdh002.doc MONGOLS1 DOC 37,376 04-10-01 11:40p Mongols1.doc UNVOC_XL DOC 26,112 04-07-01 11:20a unvoc_xl.doc USOFTARB DOC 30,208 04-07-01 9:54a usoftarb.doc WRQINDEX DOC 83,968 04-02-01 11:35a wrqindex.doc YBB1 DOC 25,088 03-22-01 5:18p ybb1.doc
So there you have it. (3a) and (3j) are scraps of لسان العرب illustrating transliteration. (3b) and (3c) are identical, giving the layout of the "Arabic (Massachusetts) 101-Key" keyboard. (3d) is a minimal macro file. (3e) turns out to be the opening of المنقذ من الضلال with Ghazali and Watt in parallel boxes of one of Winnie's tables. (3f) is ابن الاثير on the Adventus Mongolorum -- we seem to have mislaid the D'Ohsson translation somewhere else. The two pieces should eventually get combined, formatted like the previous item, and garnished with an adverse judgment on the Internet Medieval Whatever. (3g) is لسان العرب again, a group of quadriliteral roots that seem to have been included twice by the typists at المحدّث The file was designed to illustrate the "Xlit1256" font in WinWord 2 and is more or less pointless when viewed in Arabic script. It should never have been called ".DOC." (3h) is an old version of the "Three Strikes Against Windows Arabic" document, before the Persian annex was added. (3i) is a very obsolete copy of the list of books at الورّق, lacking even any separation of titles and authors.
Pretty useless lumber, all of it, but with 50 megabytes to fill at Tripod, we may as well upload it and forget it rather than go back and revise the above list.
The above ‘Medieval Whatever’ is in fact
The (Fordham) Internet Medieval Sourcebook
That link actually points to their screwed-up version of the Ibn al-’Athiyr passage.
It comes to fourteen (14) documentoids so far, but before we knock off for the day, naturally we must include
Alasmaei De Ove Capitula Septendecim
Another day, another dolor. But at least we can begin with a brand new from scratch DOC on the exciting topic of
(4) Swiping the Al-Azhar Fatwa Collection.
That document will discuss swiping their database. This document you are reading now shows what comes of swiping their wallpaper.
Speaking of dolor, look what IE5 does to my silly little Hobson-Jobson joke, or rather to the attempt to footnote it. The HTML runs, mutatibus mutandis
{H3 ALIGN=CENTER}A New Day! 16 Suffer (صفر) 1422. The moon wanes.{/H3}
I suppose the safest plan would be not to expect to get from English to Arabic and back again safely on any one line.... But what, after all, is a line? And of course it happens the second time too, {PRE} to the contrary not withstanding. There has gotta be a gimmick here. How about this?
Or this?
Or maybe give up the parentheses?
Arrrgh!
One is humiliatingly reduced to asking Winnie how to do it. Hence a very small addition to our collection,
{p class=MsoNormal}A New Day Dawns. {span style="mso-spacerun: yes"} {/span}16
Suffer ({span lang=AR-SA dir=RTL}صفر{/span}{span dir=LTR}{/span}{span dir=LTR}{/span
1422.{span style="mso-spacerun: yes"} {/span}The moon wanes.{/p}
The "mso-spacerun" stuff is presumably irrelevant as well as proprietary, and Winnie only has to lapse into so-called "Unicode" because she declares her stuff in Codepage 1252. So maybe if we try a simplified version . . .
الحمد لله! It goes like this:
{H3 ALIGN=CENTER}
A New Day Dawns. 16 Suffer (
{SPAN DIR=RTL}{B}صفر{/B}{/SPAN}
{SPAN DIR=LTR}{/SPAN}
) 1422. The moon wanes.{/H3}
The logic of immediately closing the "SPAN DIR=LTR" mark-up is not all that clear. Surely everything from here to eternity is going to be left-to-right in the absence of further notice? But hey, if it works . . .
It seems to work without the closure also, but no doubt one would forget to close it at the start of the next RTL fetch and thus pile things up on somebody's stack somewhere. What remains a bit mysterious is why the {PRE} version where all the angle brackets became curly brackets looked right also. Not to mention all those bits of Arabic tossed in above without worrying about this fandango. Probably if you resize the window just right, you can get them to foul up.
With shameless ingratitude, let us now abuse poor Winnie about how that one-line HTML file is 2,768 bytes long and only puts 54 characters (unless we miscounted) up on the screen. No doubt the "Microsoft Office HTML Filter" would get rid of some of it, but that is too far off the announced topic of this document even for us.
Time for something completely different, and what could be more different than
That page is about as mysterious as anything could well be, but if you look inside the Droobian site it seems that they are mostly giving instruction about Virtuous Basic, or whatever that µsoft product is called. And since we stumbled over it on the way to those links, what do you suppose it portends that Google has stopped misidentifying Arabic pages as Korean and started misidentifying them as Chinese (Traditional)?
Long time no scribble. But today's primary addition
has a very special bearing on this present document and demands to be linked to from here as of now. It turns out that the "Lucida Sans Unicode" font can, after all, be compelled to write the name of the month transliterated correctly. Fortunately it is still the same month so the whole project is worthwhile. Behold!
23 Ṣafar 1422
{FONT SIZE="+0" FACE="Lucida Sans Unicode"}
23 Ṣafar 1422
{/FONT}
We wish it were a slightly larger dot, but beggars cannot be choosers. The important thing is that "Lucida Sans Unicode" is free and available to everybody with Windowsnet Explorer, and al
We will also venture to add a link for
to make sure that IE5 can execute all the funnies as well as (better than?) Baronness Nono.And now (1435 EDT) we come to lucky document number seven,
which is nothing less than the Final Solution of the Arabic-Transliteration Problem. When you download it, you get embedded in it the "Lucida Sans Unicode" font. If you dare to open the macros, you get the keyboard side of things. Rejoice, rejoice! Arabic, Persian, Osmaniyyeh -- all "enabled" and all free and all public domain. All yours. (And all from El Chipo! -- please do try to remember that angle occasionally.) Lucky you, clever us. 'Nuff said. We doesn't want to toot our own
overloudly. Some people are trying to sleep.
Speaking of loons, here is a link to the L@@nikey Unisortium's beta release of the L@@nikey macros for Winnie Nono:
featuring twelve omnipotently enabled and ubiquitously localized diacritics. The whole topic deserves and will soon receive a webnode of its own. Meanwhile, here is a portrait of
Our Founder.