August 2002 PRESS RELEASE

Yaqout gains PC Magazine award

Drawing on 20 years of excellence in Arabic support on the personal computer, Diwan launches another milestone product in the new version of "al-Nashir al-Sahafi Yaqout" for Windows.

Yaqout is equipped with a set of features that not only leads other products, but makes it special within the family of Diwan products itself. This has led to Yaqout being awarded the "Recommended" logo by PC Magazine Middle East.

Yaqout easily overcomes all the difficulties of dealing with Arabic and multilingual text within all the phases of the publishing process; starting from data entry, formatting, design, writing on curves, and ending with high-end colour separation and printing. Also, it has the powerful feature of PDF document generation with font inclusion and color separation without the need for any additional tool.

Since its foundation, one of the major concerns of Diwan has been to bring the magnificence of Arabic calligraphy to the personal computer. The result of all these efforts culminated in the Diwan Mishafi typeface, which was awarded the prestigious Certificate of Excellence by the Type Directors Club (TDC2 2000 Competition). In addition to Diwan Mishafi, Yaqout is equipped with a vast library of the most beautiful Arabic typefaces which are suitable for printing and ease of reading, without sacrificing the strict rules of correct Arabic typography. Having such powerful typefaces, it was obvious that Diwan would go a step further in the integration of Yaqout by adding the glossaries of the holy Quranic text formatted using all the necessary shapes of Ottoman drawing. Those glossaries are indexed according to the Sora and Aya, and equipped with a powerful search engine offering powerful retrieval.

The next step was adding a set of beautiful Arabesque borders with the flavor of the orient. Those borders are supported by a new technology that Diwan developed specially to gain high resolution output without the need for excessive data size. Accordingly, it provides the designer more efficiency in work. Also, Yaqout comes with a unique set of Clipart based on the oriental nature.

As people started to deal with a variety of tools and environments, the drawback was on the data portability and how to transfer documents between different tools. Achieving the portability was one of the major issues in designing Yaqout. It supports document import/export between Windows and Macintosh easily and in different formats. Also, it implements OLE to insert graphics and data from other applications, like tables, spreadsheets, charts, etc.

PC Magazine - Arabic Edition awarded Yaqout with the "Recommended Product" logo (Vol.8, Issue 8, August'02), and it is listed it under the "First of the Firsts" page in every edition.

Press Contact:

Adil Allawi
Technical Director
Diwan Software Ltd
37-39 Peckham Road
London SE5 8UH,UK
Tel: +44 (0)20 7 2525 333
Fax: +44 (0)20 7 2525 444
email: info@diwan.com