Comment by muhammadn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by muhammadn | Hacker News Reader

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What is mentioned the website is basically the Jawi script.

I am a Singaporean and got married to my wife based in Kelantan, Malaysia and i had a culture shock when i had to see Jawi manuscripts on every shops here in Kelantan.

For shops signboard in Jawi is also common in Terengganu. Even my marriage certificate is in Jawi script. For most of the religious education, they still use Jawi as a script to master before they can become Islamic scholars. I think it also applies to Indonesia in the same context.

The Jawi script in Malaysia is preserved because it is under the King/Sultans decree for it to be an official manuscript and the usage for education and official matters.

Writing a keyboard for Jawi script is relatively easy when mapping phonetic latin alphabets with the same sounding Jawi (arabic alphabet) (eg. A = aleef, B = ba)

I had written the keyboards mapping for Windows, UNIX (xkeyboard) and iOS/Android but at that time there weren't any support but now there is (Called "Malay Arabic")

It's pleasing to see this kind of...is arcana the right kind of word?

We once visited an SMK Agama school because they were having trouble explaining their issue to the support desk. They were creating Word documents with a custom Jawi TTF that was...weird (sometimes it was one-to-one with sensible ASCII equivalents, but ligatures seemed to be implemented in completely random parts of the Unicode space). Nobody really seemed to know where the TTF came from either, it just sort of bounced around the aether via email, Dropbox, and ancient Google results.

They were naturally confused that copying and pasting perfectly "legible" Jawi script from Word into our <textarea> was rendering it into gibberish.

But half of us had never even heard of Jawi, we just assumed it was Arabic (but it isn't, apparently, it's more subtle than that).

We didn't quite want to commit to supporting the font directly, because it opens all sorts of questions about what to do if the receiving user doesn't have that font installed, how many fonts do we support, what if there's another font that uses different mappings (which there was)?

We did, however, produce a document that pointed to https://www.pendidik2u.my/cara-betul-install-jawi-di-kompute... with some custom explanatory text and steps, to support users who wanted to write Jawi directly in a more Unicode-friendly way (we didn't call it that, we just explained that other users "wouldn't need the font", which they approved of).

I'm not sure how many users this ultimately helped, or if they just gave up and embedded Word docs instead of using native platform text, and it's unfortunate that there isn't a more formal, one-click-install keyboard for this on the Microsoft Store.

(I also seem to remember a Tamil user who said that there might be a section of Unicode called "Tamil", but it's missing a tonne of characters they would like to use, so Unicode still has some way to go I guess)

But it is one of my favourite bug reports :)

Jawi is basically Arabic script it just has a few extra glyphs to handle phonemes that don't exist in standard Arabic. For example /p/ or /ng/ (velar nasal).

Anybody who can read the Quran and speak Malay can also read Jawi with minimal effort, which is most of population of the Malay archipelago.

A similar but distinct script was used for languages of Indonesia, e.g. Javanese and Sundanese.

That would be Pegon, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegon_script.

However, both Javanese and Sundanese also have their own distinct writing systems that are not based on Arabic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanese_script, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundanese_script) and would not be at all readable to an Arabic reader.

Thanks @criag0990 for sharing your problems with the Jawi Keyboard. Didn't know about Microsoft Store.

I'm using a macOS so i didn't notice - also macOS already has their own "Malay Arabic - Jawi" Keyboard built in so thankfully i didn't need to make one for macOS.

But i'll try to upload my version up to Microsoft Store (which is not SIRIM but based on phonetics from latin alphabets to make typing more natural as you don't need arabic stickers or arabic keyboard - You can use your normal QWERTY keyboard.

you can download it from here: https://jawikey.com but i will try to get it in Microsoft Store. :-)

I am not sure about the font because we use Ubuntu fonts and it works perfectly fine. (maybe missing for "va" character)

As for the font is that as long the font supports those jawi-specific unicode characters everything should be fine. For now, things have gotten a lot better with Jawi as compared 6-7 years ago.

The version from your URL is actually the official Malaysian SIRIM Standard which is based on the Arabic keyboard.

Ah, I see, so yours is using a different key mapping, but still outputs the correct Unicode characters? I remember the stickers on the keyboards :)

By "weird TTF font" earlier, I meant they had a Jawi font that basically worked like Wingdings - they were typing a genuine ASCII "A" (0x41/0x61), but the font was "rendering" an aleph (I think). So it looked OK with the font. But it wasn't "proper" Unicode.

I'll keep https://jawikey.com in mind for the future though :)

> (I also seem to remember a Tamil user who said that there might be a section of Unicode called "Tamil", but it's missing a tonne of characters they would like to use, so Unicode still has some way to go I guess)

Tamil Unicode is perfectly usable; this sounds like someone who didn't understand the encoding model, and expected to see a separate Unicode character for each consonant/vowel combination.

That is entirely possible. As somebody who doesn't read/write anything beyond English, I didn't want to disagree.

The "virtual keyboards" I've seen in use for non-Latin writing systems seem cumbersome to me as an outsider, so perhaps they found it difficult to produce the right combinations to achieve what they wanted.

I'm always a bit disappointed that my response to the issue of trying to digitise someone's culture is to kinda shrug and say "that's the best we've got".

Not sure how true this is, but in Singapore I've heard that the only use for Jawi left is in the weekly Friday sermon (I just checked - weekly khutbahs are uploaded weekly in Jawi). It's a very critical aspect of making language relevant. Unfortunately I doubt this will continue for long, especially as senior religious leaders (who grew up reading Jawi) eventually pass.

I've never seen a sermon in Singapore (usually shown from a projector) in Jawi. Maybe the Imams there do read the same copy but in Jawi and the congregants in latin alphabets because i don't think the masses can read Jawi.

Maybe i should check on MUIS's (Singapore's Muslim Religious Authority) website to see if there are Jawi copies of the sermons.

On another note there is Arwi which is an Arabic-Tamil script, which is in a more dire state than Jawi. Unlike Jawi, Arwi is not preserved (or protected by authority) in anyway like how Malaysia does and most of the corpus written in Arwi is now being eaten by termites, which is a really sad thing that the knowledge specific to the Indian muslims is getting lost in time and is not being digitized.

That's interesting!

My mother grew up in Perak (40s and 50s) and I just asked her about this and she said she doesn't particularly remember seeing Jawi (she was from a different community). Of course all those pre-independence documents like my parents' wedding license are in English!

I don't remember it much from various 60s/70s visits as a kid and it's the kind of thing I used to looked out for. Times have changed!

Perak is on the west coast and was one of the first states to come under British influence. The states the grandparent mention are on the east coast and tend to be developmentally uh at an earlier stage.

Definitely going to agree with that “uh” but things in the 60s and 70s were really different.

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