Intelligent digitisation of Arabic characters

There are currently a number of initiatives aiming at introducing the digital age to the Arab world. This includes efforts to expose new technologyfor both home and commercial usage. Of the leading companies in this area is Sakhr Software, who have just launched their programme (SakhrMedia) to support the learning process in the local educational institutions. The objective, here, is to meet the greater requirement of computerising both the techniques and knowledge which has thus far been oriented alongside traditionalplatforms. To this regards efforts have been made to computerise Arabic typography and language (often referred to as Arabisation). This is vitally important not just to meet everyday (current) needs, but also to harmonisefor the Arab audience the interaction with worldwide accepted application packages, as well as the Internet. The purpose of this paper is to revisit the digitising process (sometimes called rasterisation) of the most valued aspects of a language, its character set. Through using a geometric modelling approach, a computer system has been developed to extract and storefeatures ofArabicfonts. Such a process lends itself to fast reconstruction and rendering of characters, and for text recognition techniques. The discussion, here, provides an insight to the workings of the system, with view to assisting the digitisation process for the Arabic case.