Can it read ruqʿah when the dots are missing?

Often, because the missing dots are recoverable from the word and the phrase rather than the shape. Readings that depend on context alone can be flagged, so you can check the names and numbers, which are the places where context gives no help.

How are Arabic-Indic numerals handled?

They are transcribed in the order they appear on the page, not in the order the surrounding right-to-left text runs, and you can choose whether to keep the original figures or convert them. Dates can be left in the hijrī form the document uses.

What about a page that is half Ottoman Turkish?

Each column or passage can be labelled with its language and transcribed separately. The two share an alphabet but not a vocabulary, and keeping them apart also lets a Turkish specialist take over the Ottoman half without untangling it from the Arabic first.

Is printed nineteenth-century Arabic easier than manuscript?

Not always. Early type is uneven, ligatures are cast as single sorts, the ink bleeds through thin paper, and the frames and footlines confuse column detection. It helps to say what the page furniture is so that a quire signature is not read as the last line of the text.

Can crossed-out words be recovered from a draft?

Sometimes. Where a single stroke runs through the word the letters below are usually still readable and can be transcribed with a note; where the ink is scribbled solid the passage is marked as deleted and illegible rather than guessed at.

Arabic · c. 1600–1950

From a copyist’s naskh to a journalist’s crossed-out draft

Between 1600 and 1950 the same language was written in two very different ways: a careful naskh for books, and a fast ruqʿah or half-ruqʿah for everything else, in which dots merge, vowels vanish and a whole word can shrink to a zigzag. The presses added a third layer, with numerals, running heads and two languages sharing a page.

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Sample pages

Manuscript page in small naskh with the defined terms picked out in red ink and the rest of the text in dark brown — Sample 1. A page of al-Jurjānī’s dictionary of technical terms, Kitāb al-Taʿrīfāt, in a copy dated 1770, Paris, BULAC, MS.ARA.67. The hand is a plain, closely written naskh with almost no vocalisation; each headword is written in red so that the entries can be found by eye, and the isolated red nūn part-way down the page opens a new alphabetical run.

Two printed columns of Arabic script on a stained sheet, the right column in Ottoman Turkish and the left in Arabic — Sample 2. The first issue of al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyya, the official gazette of Muḥammad ʿAlī’s Egypt, printed at Būlāq in 1828 and now in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The right-hand column is in Ottoman Turkish and the left in Arabic, set in the same type, with an ornamental rule across the head of the sheet and a double rule closing the block at the foot.

Printed page of an Arabic book inside a heavy ruled frame, with a bracketed page number above and a quire signature below — Sample 3. A page of the popular epic Sīrat ʿAntar ibn Shaddād in an edition of 1869, Paris, BULAC. Nineteenth-century Arabic printing keeps the shape of a manuscript page: a heavy rule round the block, the page number in brackets above it, and a footline giving the title, the part and the quire number so that a binder could assemble the sheets.

Magazine page in a naskh typeface with a running head, a page number in an ornamental frame and dates in Arabic-Indic numerals — Sample 4. Page 113 of al-Hilāl, volume 1 part 4, Cairo, December 1892, from an article on Peter the Great. The running head carries the subject and the page number, the footline the part and the year, and the prose is interrupted by figures — a membership of ١٤٤, the years ١٧٢٤ and ١٧٢٥ — that run left to right inside lines that run right to left.

Page of rapid Arabic handwriting with many words struck through and replacements squeezed between the lines — Sample 5. A page in the hand of Jurjī Zaydān (1861–1914), the Beirut-born writer who founded al-Hilāl, reproduced from a study of him. The script is the compressed everyday hand of the period, close to ruqʿah, written at speed with no vocalisation; a dozen phrases are struck out and their replacements written above the line, and a date in Arabic-Indic figures sits in the middle of a paragraph.

What Arabic looks like in these three centuries

Manuscript copying went on unchanged well into the nineteenth century. A scholar’s copy is written in a plain naskh, ruled to a fixed block, with headwords and key phrases picked out in red, a catchword at the foot, and a colophon giving the copyist and the date. Alongside it stands the everyday hand. Ruqʿah, codified in the Ottoman chancery and taught in schools across the Arab provinces, is small, tightly joined and written with a very short pen movement: the teeth of sīn flatten to a straight line, the loops of medial hāʾ and ʿayn close up, and the two dots of tāʾ or yāʾ become a single dash or disappear. Notes, letters, registers, marginal comments and drafts are written in it or in something less tidy still.

Print arrives in Arabic-speaking countries in force in the nineteenth century. The Būlāq press at Cairo, founded in the 1820s, printed the government gazette al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyya as well as editions of the classics; presses in Beirut, Istanbul and Malta followed, and by the 1890s there were magazines like al-Hilāl and al-Muqtaṭaf with running heads, framed columns and page numbers. Early printed pages keep habits inherited from the manuscript: a rule around the text block, a catchword or quire signature at the foot, partial vocalisation of difficult words, and the same rubrication done with a heavier type. Government printing was often bilingual, with Ottoman Turkish and Arabic in parallel columns on the same sheet.

What makes this material awkward is the mixture. Eastern Arabic numerals run left to right inside a line that runs right to left, and a date, a page number or a quantity therefore reverses direction in the middle of a sentence. European personal and place names appear in Latin letters or in an Arabic transcription that varies from page to page. Drafts are covered in deletions, insertions written above the line and words crossed through so heavily that only the shape below the ink survives. Registers and forms put all of this into ruled boxes, where a heading may be printed and the entry written by hand.

Why ordinary OCR struggles here

Ruqʿah drops the information the reader needs

In a fast hand the dots move, merge or go missing, short vowels are absent, and final ه, ة, ي and ى all end in a similar hook. What separates them is the direction the pen was travelling and the grammar of the sentence, not the shape on the page, which is exactly what shape-based recognition cannot see.

Numerals that run the other way

A line of Arabic runs right to left; the digits inside it run left to right. Dates, page references, sums of money and years of the hijrī and Gregorian calendars therefore break the reading order several times in a paragraph, and a transcription that gets the order wrong turns ١٢٤٤ into a different number.

Two languages, one alphabet

An official gazette may set Ottoman Turkish beside Arabic in the same script, and a scholarly page may quote Persian. The letters are the same and the languages are not, so the columns have to be separated before either can be read; merged, they produce a text that is neither.

Drafts, deletions and insertions

An author’s working page is a record of second thoughts: words struck through, replacements squeezed above the line, whole passages ruled out. A useful transcription shows what was deleted and what replaced it rather than silently printing the final state or, worse, reading the cancelled words as part of the sentence.

Who works with this material

Newspaper and periodical digitisation projects

Runs of al-Hilāl, al-Muqtaṭaf, al-Ahrām and dozens of provincial papers exist as page images with no usable text. Getting the columns, the running heads and the figures right is what makes a run searchable by name, place and date.

Archivists working with Ottoman provincial records

Court registers, endowment deeds and petitions from the Arab provinces are written in a fast hand and often mix Arabic with Ottoman Turkish formulae. A transcription that keeps the two apart and preserves the dates is the basis for any index of parties, places and sums.

Editors of modern Arabic literary papers

Authors’ drafts, letters and notebooks from the nahḍa onwards survive in private and institutional collections. What an editor needs is not a clean reading text but a record of the deletions and insertions, since those are the evidence for how a piece was written.

Family and local historians

Identity papers, land certificates, school records and letters from the late Ottoman and mandate periods are the everyday sources for tracing a family. They are short, formulaic and written in a hand few people now read fluently, which is exactly where a first transcription helps most.

Getting the best transcription

Step 1

Say whether the page is set or written

A printed page and a ruqʿah note need different instructions. For print, ask for the columns, running heads and footlines to be labelled; for handwriting, warn the model that pointing is unreliable and that words may be reduced to a skeleton.

Step 2

Fix the treatment of numerals

Decide whether Arabic-Indic figures should be kept as ١٢٣ or converted to 123, and whether hijrī dates should be left as written. State it once: numbers are where reading order goes wrong, and a consistent rule makes the errors easy to spot.

Step 3

Ask for deletions to be shown

On a draft, request that struck-through words are transcribed and marked as deleted, and that insertions above the line are placed where they belong with a note that they were added. That turns a messy page into something an editor can actually collate.

Step 4

Separate the languages before reading

On a bilingual gazette or a register with Ottoman formulae, ask for each column or passage to be identified by language first and transcribed second. Test on a single sheet before running a whole volume, because a column that is misassigned once will be misassigned everywhere.

Frequently asked questions

Can it read ruqʿah when the dots are missing?: Often, because the missing dots are recoverable from the word and the phrase rather than the shape. Readings that depend on context alone can be flagged, so you can check the names and numbers, which are the places where context gives no help.
How are Arabic-Indic numerals handled?: They are transcribed in the order they appear on the page, not in the order the surrounding right-to-left text runs, and you can choose whether to keep the original figures or convert them. Dates can be left in the hijrī form the document uses.
What about a page that is half Ottoman Turkish?: Each column or passage can be labelled with its language and transcribed separately. The two share an alphabet but not a vocabulary, and keeping them apart also lets a Turkish specialist take over the Ottoman half without untangling it from the Arabic first.
Is printed nineteenth-century Arabic easier than manuscript?: Not always. Early type is uneven, ligatures are cast as single sorts, the ink bleeds through thin paper, and the frames and footlines confuse column detection. It helps to say what the page furniture is so that a quire signature is not read as the last line of the text.
Can crossed-out words be recovered from a draft?: Sometimes. Where a single stroke runs through the word the letters below are usually still readable and can be transcribed with a note; where the ink is scribbled solid the passage is marked as deleted and illegible rather than guessed at.

Related scripts and pages

Mashriqi Naskh and Related Book Hands, c. 1000–1500The medieval book hand that these copyists were still using three centuries later.Printed Ottoman Turkish and Ruqʿah Manuscript Material, c. 1729–1928The Turkish half of the same presses and the same everyday hand.Early Islamic Arabic Papyri and Administrative Hands, c. 640–900Where the documentary tradition starts, twelve centuries earlier and on papyrus.All Arabic hands and document typesEvery Arabic domain from the first papyri to Ottoman-era registers and printed Bulaq pages.Image to TextSearch all supported languages, scripts and document types.

Transcribe your Ottoman-era Arabic pages

Upload a manuscript leaf, a gazette or a draft, choose Ottoman-Era Arabic Naskh and Ruqʿah Documents, and set the rule for numerals first.

From a copyist’s naskh to a journalist’s crossed-out draft

Sample pages

Evidano Transcription

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What Arabic looks like in these three centuries

Why ordinary OCR struggles here

Ruqʿah drops the information the reader needs

Numerals that run the other way

Two languages, one alphabet

Drafts, deletions and insertions

Who works with this material

Newspaper and periodical digitisation projects

Archivists working with Ottoman provincial records

Editors of modern Arabic literary papers

Family and local historians

Getting the best transcription

Say whether the page is set or written

Fix the treatment of numerals

Ask for deletions to be shown

Separate the languages before reading

Further reading on this hand

Frequently asked questions

Related scripts and pages

Transcribe your Ottoman-era Arabic pages

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