Zarnegar () is a commercial

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current word ...

developed by

SinaSoft Corporation SinaSoft Corporation () is an Iranian software company founded in 1985. SinaSoft has been inactive since early 2000s and most of the software development and support has been transferred to Sina Cultural and Software Foundation. References ...

. It is specialized for

Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...

and

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

languages, and their intricacies. The first version of Zarnegar, which ran on

DOS DOS (, ) is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of IBM PC DOS and a rebranded version, Microsoft's MS-DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible syste ...

, was released in April 1991. A Windows version was first made available in 2000.

Etymology

The name "Zarnegar" is a

double entendre A double entendre (plural double entendres) is a figure of speech or a particular way of wording that is devised to have a double meaning, one of which is typically obvious, and the other often conveys a message that would be too socially unacc ...

. Literally, it means "what writes with gold"; however, because the typefaces included with the first version of Zarnegar were Zar and Terafik, it can be taken to means "what writes with Zar". After the initial release, however, new fonts were added to Zarnegar every few months, which later became the source of most Persian fonts on

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

systems.

History

Before Zarnegar, several DOS-based

text editors A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. An example of such program is "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be used to ...

, like Safhe-Ara (), a Persian-enabled Personal Editor 2 (a.k.a. PE2) and Pishkar (, the first product of SinaSoft), were available for basic

monospace A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spaci ...

d desktop publishing only. Zarnegar is the first word processor with specialized support for Persian and Arabic scripts, therefore, establishing new methods of

desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using dedicated software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online co ...

and handling the alphabet in the digital environment. The main development of Zarnegar happened between 1991 and 1995, with the heaviest work done in 1993 and 1994. In the 1990s, Zarnegar was more popular than the competitors, possibly because of the variety and beauty of the bundled fonts, ease of use, and paying attention to market needs, support and education.

Features

Zarnegar has been a pioneer in Persian desktop publishing with supporting a diverse set of features, some not found in the generic competitors. Notable features are: * Supporting calligraphy-based and handwriting-based Persian fonts * Manual

kerning In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between Character (symbol), characters in a Typeface#Proportion, proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning adjusts the space between individual le ...

for letters and manual positioning of diacritics, explicitly (per word) or as document settings (per font) * Type setting of math formulas, graphs, tables, and Persian poetry * Alternate glyphs for letters with UI to select alternates per word, and manage rules to use alternates for line elongation/justification * Alternate forms for digit zero (of

Eastern Arabic numerals The Eastern Arabic numerals, also called Indo-Arabic numerals or Arabic-Indic numerals as known by Unicode, are the symbols used to represent numerical digits in conjunction with the Arabic alphabet in the countries of the Mashriq (the east o ...

): round/diamond and solid/hollow shapes * Special effects on text—such as shadows with custom angles, background and filling patterns, stroke width and color—with plug-in support for third-party features * Persian/Arabic justification with advanced options (see following list for details) * Embedded

dictionaries (for various areas, like math, chemistry, physics, geography, proper names, computing, and one for etymology) for

spell checking In software, a spell checker (or spelling checker or spell check) is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic d ...

, with possibility of creating new dictionaries to share with other users * Sorting and collation, per language (Persian/English) or using system language (in Windows only) * On-screen measurement of rendered text, in both DOS and Windows versions * Customizable keyboard layouts (Persian, Arabic and English) * Embedded phone book with network-based syncing functionality * Support for import from or exporting to

Rich Text Format ) As an example, the following RTF code would be rendered as follows: This is some bold text. Character encoding A standard RTF file can only consist of 7-bit ASCII characters, but can use escape sequences to encode other characters. ...

(RTF), the Microsoft Word format and

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

* Support for the Iran System encoding * Predefined (list) counter styles for Persian numerals, Persian alphabet, Persian abjad, Greek numerals, and English alphabet *

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

and

EPS An extended play (EP) is a Sound recording and reproduction, musical recording that contains more tracks than a Single (music), single but fewer than an album. Contemporary EPs generally contain up to eight tracks and have a playing time of 1 ...

outputs, with

CMYK The CMYK color model (also known as process color, or four color) is a subtractive color model, based on the CMY color model, used in color printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself. The abbreviation ''CMYK'' refers ...

support * Advanced printing options in DOS and Windows versions * Page layout options for publishing books, manuals and periodicals

Paragraph justification

Zarnegar has advanced support for Persian and Arabic paragraph justification, supporting the following options: * Manual insertion of

Kashida Kashida or kasheeda (,Transliteration based on Classical and Early New Persian (but also applies to the modern varieties of Dari and Tajik). In Modern Iranian Persian, however, this would be transliterated as or . ), also known as tatweel or ...

character * Length of Kashida character: short, medium, long, very long * Length of

whitespace character A whitespace character is a character data element that represents white space when text is rendered for display by a computer. For example, a ''space'' character (, ASCII 32) represents blank space such as a word divider in a Western scrip ...

* Percentage of letter spacing reduction * Percentage of using Kashida vs. whitespace character * Per-word selection of elongation method (where to place Kashida in a word)

Encodings

Zarnegar has employed two different character sets and file formats.

Zarnegar1 character set

Zarnegar used an Iran System-based character encoding system, named Zarnegar1, with text file formats for its early versions, up to the Zarnegar 75 version. The Zarnegar1 character set is a two-form left-to-right (visual) encoding, meaning that every

Perso-Arabic The Persian alphabet (), also known as the Perso-Arabic script, is the right-to-left script, right-to-left alphabet used for the Persian language. It is a variation of the Arabic script with four additional letters: (the sounds 'g', 'zh', ' ...

letter receives different character codes based on its cursive joining form, but most letters receive only two forms, because of the limited code-points available.

Zarnegar75 character set

With the Zarnegar 75 version, a new character encoding system was introduced, and the file format was changed to a binary format. The Zarnegar75 character set is a four-form bidirectional visual encoding, meaning that every Perso-Arabic letter receives a one, two, or four character code, depending on its cursive joining form, and these letters are stored in the memory in the semantic order.

References

External links

* {{Word processors DOS word processors Windows word processors