Zarnegar is a commercial word processor developed by SinaSoft Corporation. It is specialized for Persian and Arabic languages, and their intricacies. The first version of Zarnegar, which ran on DOS, was released in April 1991. A Windows version was first made available in 2000.
Etymology
The name, Zarnegar is a double entendre. Literally, it means "what writes with gold"; however, because the two typeface included with the first version of Zarnegar were Zar and Terafik, it can be taken to means "what writes with Zar". After the initial release, however, new fonts were added to Zarnegar every few months, which later became the source of most Persian fonts on Windows systems.
History
Before Zarnegar, several DOS-based text editors, like Safhe-Ara, a Persian-enabled Personal Editor 2 and Pishkar, were available for basic monospaced desktop publishing only. Zarnegar is the first word processor with specialized support for Persian and Arabic scripts, therefore, establishing new methods of desktop publishing and handling the alphabet in the digital environment. The main development of Zarnegar happened between 1991 and 1995, with the heaviest work done in 1993 and 1994. In the 1990s, Zarnegar was more popular than the competitors, possibly because of variety and beauty of the bundled fonts, ease of use, and paying attention to market needs, support and education.
Features
Zarnegar has been a pioneer in Persian desktop publishing with supporting a diverse set of features, some not found in the generic competitors. Notable features are:
Supporting calligraphy-based and handwriting-based Persian fonts
Manual kerning for letters and manual positioning of diacritics, explicitly or as document settings
Type setting of math formulas, graphs, tables, and Persian poetry
Alternate glyphs for letters with UI to select alternates per word, and manage rules to use alternates for line elongation/justification
Alternate forms for digit zero : round/diamond and solid/hollow shapes
Special effects on text—such as shadows with custom angles, background and filling patterns, stroke width and color—with plug-in support for third-party features
Persian/Arabic justification with advanced options
Embedded Persian dictionaries for spell checking, with possibility of creating new dictionaries to share with other users
Sorting and collation, per language or using system language
On-screen measurement of rendered text, in both DOS and Windows versions
Zarnegar used an Iran System-based character encoding system, named Zarnegar1, with text file formats for its early versions, up to the Zarnegar 75 version. Zarnegar1 character set is a 2-form left-to-right encoding, meaning that every Perso-Arabic letter receives different character codes based on its cursive joining form, but most letters receive only 2 forms, because of the limited code-points available2 forms, because of the limited code-points available.
Zarnegar75 Character Set
With Zarnegar 75 version of the program, a new character encoding system was introduced, and the file format was changed to a binary format. Zarnegar75 character set is a 4-form bidirectional visual encoding, meaning that every Perso-Arabic letter receives one, two, or four character code, depending on its cursive joining form, and these letters are stored in the memory in the semantic order.
