Oman’s new electronic Qur'an
Solving discrepancies between historical text, rules of calligraphy and Azhar orthography
The Omani electronic edition of the Qur'an was launched in 2017 by the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs of the Sultanate of Oman. This digital edition takes into account calligraphic legacy of Arabic with its complicated orthography and elaborate script rules. For this official edition of the Sultanate of Oman, new computer typography had to be invented. Verses of the Qur'an are displayed with a computer model of the Ottoman writing style (naskh style). The challenge was to reconcile its delicate script grammar with orthography of the Qur'an printed in 1924. In this regard the digital edition of the Omani Qur'an is a master piece combining calligraphy and precise digital structure.
Thomas Milo is a linguist (Slavic, Turkic, Arabic), who works in a team with a designer-architect (Mirjam Somers), an aircraft engineer (Peter Somers), a mathematician (Stan Jesmanowicz) and a designer-artist(Lara Captan). Thomas Milo has been working to bridge the gap between scholarship and computer technology since the 1980s, with a focus on Cyrillic and Arabic text encoding and modelling traditional Islamic scripts. Major scholarly publications are now produced with the resulting technologies, such as the Library of Arabic Literature by New York University Press, and most Arabic publications of Brill Publishers Leiden. Thomas Milo is one of the contributors to the Corpus Coranicum Project since its beginnings.