Digital Printing of Arabic: Mushaf Qatar

After having defined the problem, and having seen a solution, let us now familiarize ourselves with a bad example. Much like the Mushaf Muscat, Muṣḥaf Qaṭar likes to present a technological proof of concept in the form of a digital coffee table book. The website is running for a long while now, since 2010. The mushaf it presents is based on the technology of Adobe Flash. This technology has become outdated and will be in a few years defunct and obsolete. The text of the Quran is simply rendered as an image of computer-typed pages. This makes the text not selectable, unsharp, and in general unappealing. The navigation is rudimentary, be it snappy. You can select to view one or two pages, hear a recitation, change the border, omit the border, enter some sort of fullscreen mode, and navigate to a certain page, sura, or verse. Each page individually can be controlled to zoom in/out and move around. It is hard to imagine this would have been exciting even in 2010. Today it feels limiting. Exactly what the merit of the digital format is above and beyond a printed copy is not entirely clear. As such, it simply is a relic of the past.