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Department of Mathematics, University of Kuwait

ABSTRACT

In Arabic script as well as in the script of other similar languages the shape of a letter changes from one word to another. The number of different shapes for some letters may be three or even four depending on the neighbouring letters in the word. For this reason it became usual to allocate more than one key for the same letter in the Arabic typewriter and computer terminal keyboards. In recent years and with the introduction of word processors, the Arabic keyboard was modified and the number of keys representing the same letter was reduced as a result of applying contextual analysis to each character in order to choose the correct shape of the character. Most of the context analyses used lack generality and are hardly satisfactory. In this paper a mathematical model for an Arabic script generator is introduced and the model is reduced to an algorithm which was implemented on a microcomputer to generate Arabic script using one key only for each character.