«رقمنة أساليب الطباعة التاريخية: إسهامات «مطبعة بولاق

Abstract

It is known that various peoples throughout the Islamic world adopted the Arabic alphabet to write their original writing with an adapted version of Arabic script. Thus, various languages are currently written using Arabic script, such as Persian (Iran), Pashto, Dari (Afghanistan), Urdu (India, Pakistan), Javanese (Indonesia), Malay (Malaysia), Kurdish (Iraq), and Uyghur (China). This variety of languages used different Arabic script styles such as naskh, ruq’a, nasta‘liq (farsi), diwani, and square kufic. When typography was first introduced in the Arab world in the 17th Century, there were no typefaces (printing letters) that respected the grammar of Arabic script. However, the Bulaq Press played an essential role in promoting the spirit of scholarship and knowledge dissemination in Egypt and the Near East during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The shift of book production in Egypt after 1850 was marked by the graphic technology evolution, the use of different languages in its printed productions: Arabic, Turkish and Persian. In addition, Bulaq Press managed to be a pioneer in the Islamic World by printing the Quran during King Fouad’s reign (1923). The latter is considered a master work from which the Bulaq Press typeface was revived and ready to be used in new publication. Thus, the BA Writing and Scripts Center (WSC) managed to digitize the naskh typeface of the Bulaq Press Quran and printed it on a CD. Our intent is to suggest a multidisciplinary project that investigates the evolution of Bulaq Press typefaces, then to explain the method used by the Bulaq Press Quran typeface to digitize, and finally to initiate a multidisciplinary collaboration to fulfill this ambitious project.