AlQalam (``the pen'' in Arabic) is our freely available system
intended for typesetting the Qur'an, other traditional texts, and any
publications in the languages using the Arabic script.

From a typographical point of view, the Qur'an is one of the most
demanding texts. However, there is a long historical record of
excellent quality materials (manuscripts and recent printings) to
guide the work on a system to typeset it. Such a system, once
complete, can easily typeset any work using the Arabic script,
including those with mixed languages.

The current version of AlQalam grows out of modifications to an earlier 
TeX package named ArabTeX. Currently, AlQalam depends on ArabTeX and 
loads some of ArabTeX's files unchanged. AlQalam supplies the remaining 
components which are modified versions of the original ArabTeX files in 
addition to a number of new files. This strong link to ArabTeX will 
probably change in the future. Since AlQalam modifies the behavior of 
some internal commands of the original ArabTeX, the two packages cannot 
be used together in a single TeX file.

The copyright holder for AlQalam is Hossam A. H. Fahmy.

    This work may be distributed and/or modified under the
    conditions of the LaTeX Project Public License, either version 1.3
    of this license or (at your option) any later version.
    The latest version of this license is in
      http://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt
    and version 1.3 or later is part of all distributions of LaTeX
    version 2005/12/01 or later.

 This work has the LPPL maintenance status `maintained'.

 The Current Maintainer of this work is Hossam A. H. Fahmy.
 (hfahmy@arith.stanford.edu)

 This work consists of all the files listed in alqalam_manifest.txt.

A copy of the license is given in the file LICENSE.
The contributors are listed in the file contributors.
