﷽ <- the single codepoint the author is talking about.
It's pretty great fun pasting it into various text entry fields to see how they behave.
In standard-ish single-line-ish Apple text fields on my Mac (iMessage text entry field, Chrome Omnibox), it renders like this, which... I'm not sure is correct? https://cleanshot.com/share/0GkNJGQ7
On the other hand it renders akin to Chrome in TextEdit.
This is my favourite single character to demonstrate that you cannot lay text out without knowing the font, which people sometimes try to claim is possible in terminals: in some fonts, it’s 10em wide and less than 1em tall, but in others, it’s under 3em wide and perhaps 2em tall.
(If people aren’t convinced by that, my next area is complex text layout, starting with my name in the Telugu script, <https://temp.chrismorgan.info/క్రిస్.svg>, also augmenting that with how the r can be drawn to the left or underneath or even a little to the right of the k, which I really should add to that SVG file.)
Arabic is so dense, and Quran came to perfect it.
Reading the following verse from Quran, makes me proud that I'm a native Arabic speaker:
"إِنَّا أَنزَلْنَاهُ قُرْآنًا عَرَبِيًّا لَّعَلَّكُمْ تَعْقِلُونَ"
"Indeed, We have sent it down as an Arabic Qur'an that you might understand."
Quran 12:2
It’s interesting to see an article to decipher the sentence when I know Arabic handwriting calligraphy in different fonts! The “bisme” itself btw is also a combination of two different words. And “kashida” is a persian word not Arabic, the Arabic one is probably “maddah”.
I started my software career maintaining and forking Unicode parsers. Arabic, Hindi, Chinese and Thai among many other complex languages. It was great fun and it helped me get a deep understanding of how complex writing was and appreciate the beauty of being able to reduce this complexity down to data structures and functions.
We have a framed calligraphy at home, and it was fascinating to teach my wife how it is read. The one in the article (wikimedia picture) is actually read from the bottom up, yet it is somehow legible.
There seems to be a multiple-of-19 "code" in the Quran. Many of these observations require the Arab alphabet to be interpreted as numbers; in Mohammed's days the Abjad system was used for this (similar but simpler than the Roman numerals, that also re-use the letters as numbers).
So using the Abjad system to give number values to the Arab letters there are many counts that add up to a multiple of 19. A critic (and I try to be one) so note that every 19 tries ("would this add up to a multiple of 19?") you are expected to find one that does add up to a multiple of 19!
In order to show how many cases add up, I created a unit test suite to demonstrate the claims.
Cool article, but the one it acknowledges and riffs off of, at https://lr0.org/blog/p/arabic/ , is much more informative, and tells all about how we got decent Arabic script rendering on our browers and OSs, but still notably imperfect.
Which makes me think: come on, in the age of Claude, the gap between "we know what to do" and "here is the working code" is narrower than ever.
Who will be the one to pick up the job? Has to be an Arabic speaker I guess!
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[ 14.3 ms ] story [ 45.1 ms ] threadIt's pretty great fun pasting it into various text entry fields to see how they behave.
In standard-ish single-line-ish Apple text fields on my Mac (iMessage text entry field, Chrome Omnibox), it renders like this, which... I'm not sure is correct? https://cleanshot.com/share/0GkNJGQ7
On the other hand it renders akin to Chrome in TextEdit.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:-516170388361w7xlt8c...
Next I'm going to learn the rest of the letters and try to start reading menus.
Seeing Arabic calligraphy has made me add Arabic to the list of languages I am very slowly teaching myself.
(If people aren’t convinced by that, my next area is complex text layout, starting with my name in the Telugu script, <https://temp.chrismorgan.info/క్రిస్.svg>, also augmenting that with how the r can be drawn to the left or underneath or even a little to the right of the k, which I really should add to that SVG file.)
So using the Abjad system to give number values to the Arab letters there are many counts that add up to a multiple of 19. A critic (and I try to be one) so note that every 19 tries ("would this add up to a multiple of 19?") you are expected to find one that does add up to a multiple of 19!
In order to show how many cases add up, I created a unit test suite to demonstrate the claims.
See the code here:
https://github.com/cies/quran-analysis/blob/master/replicate...
Many of the claims involve the Bismallah (search for "bismallah" in that code).
Which makes me think: come on, in the age of Claude, the gap between "we know what to do" and "here is the working code" is narrower than ever.
Who will be the one to pick up the job? Has to be an Arabic speaker I guess!