Diwan started the electronic newspaper publishing revolution with those products and a number of new ones for information workflow like NewsNet, PictureNet and CommsNet. Al-Hayat newspaper was launched in London in 1987 using Diwan's systems. It was, according to a BBC programme, the first ever fully electronic newspaper in the world. Soon other Arab newspapers adopted Diwan's system, like Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Al-Ahram and others.
The current company, Diwan Software Limited, is still owned and managed by original founders of Diwan (Science and Information Technology Limited) and represents some of the longest experience and best knowledge of any company in the Arabic software market.
The first major act of Diwan Software Limited was to buy the full international marketing and copyrights to Ready,Set,Go! from Esselte for a cash payment of a quarter million US dollars on 9 September 1996.
Traditional Products: Diwan Software Limited's speciality was and still is electronic publishing.
In international markets our desktop publishing application, Ready,Set,Go! (RSG), handles all world languages. RSG was one of the first desktop publishers for the Apple Macintosh, and the latest version has all the features expected of a high-end DTP application. The languages its support includes Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and the major Indian scripts.
Unlike other Arab computer companies Diwan has a sizable market in the United States, where RSG was one of first DTP applications and is still popular especially in American education institutions.
Al-Nashir al-Sahafi is the industry standard DTP package in the Middle East used by most Arab daily newspapers and colour magazines. Its latest version, called al-Nashir al-Sahafi Dibaj, supports a wide library of new Arabic typefaces. Our award-winning Mishafi Font is one of the most beautiful and complex typefaces ever created and contains more than 4,000 letter-shapes. It also contains all the forms that are necessary for the composition of the holy Quran. A new addition to our library is the complete Linotype Arabic font collection which has been produced in association with Linotype Library GmbH.
New Products
Electronic Publishing: Drawing from more than 14 years experience in multi-lingual software programing Diwan have been, since about three years, preparing a series of new technologies that combines desktop publishing, the internet and archiving. The aim is to make electronic publishing a single integrated process using a database server as a basis for the whole system. This is achieved by Diwan new major application: Network Information System (NIS).
It is our aim that new integrated process would start another publishing revolution like the one started with the Al Hayat newspaper more than ten years ago.
Mobile Computing: Diwan has pioneered significant new technologies to enable Arabic on mobile devices. Our WAP publisher is the first ever system that is capable of publishing information in Arabic to a WAP enabled mobile phone. Diwan has also developed a typeface suitable for use on the small screens of mobile phones. This has been licensed by Siemens for use in all their mobile phones.
Cultural Projects: Diwan has produced a complete encoding of the Holy Quran into Unicode together with a typeface containing all the necessary shapes required by the handwritten and printed versions. Our advanced font technology has been designed to layout the Quran correctly from the text alone without any need for manual formatting from the user.
A version of this system is being built to distribute the text of the Quran via the Internet while another version will be applied to display the Quran in hand-held devices.
RECENT WORK BY DIWAN:
* Localization of Siemens mobile phones, and leasing of specialized Arabic fonts.
* A new Windows version of al-Nashir al-Sahafi has been released in February 2001, containing all the features of the Mac version plus additional ones.
* Diwan announced at the 17th Unicode conference, in San Jose, California, September 2000, the completion of its encoding of the Holy Quran into Unicode together with a typeface capable of rendering all the calligraphy of hand-written Qurans.
* Diwan is cooperating with Sun on the next release of Sun's Java technology to help improve its support for the Arabic language. We are also applying this work to make the Holy Quran available via the internet using Java technology. The results of Diwan's work was demonstrated on Sun Microsystems stand at GITEX 2000 in Dubai from 28th October to 1 November. Diwan is a strategic member of the Sun Developer Connection - Sun's online community for developers using the Java Solaris platforms.
* Since 1998 Diwan has a Regional Office in Amman, Jordan. This Office has 28 employees both full time and technical consultants dedicated to development, research, technical support and fonts development.
* Diwan was among the very first companies to reserve an Office at Dubai Internet City. Building and installation was completed on 8 March 2001 and the Office is due to be opened at the end of March 2001. At present there are already 5 full time executives and technical staff in Dubai. This team is ready to be enlarged to cope with future expansion of work.
Diwan is based in London, U.K., with 6 full time executives and technical staff, and a team of consultants.
(c) 2001 Diwan Software Ltd. Last updated March 2001
