The design of a complete uniform segmented display unit for Arabic alphanumeric characters

Abstract

There are four forms for most of the Arabic characters- initial, medial, final and isolated. This paper presents the design of a complete display unit for Arabic alphanumeric characters using uniform segments. The word ‘complete’ signifies that the proposed display unit can represent all forms of entire Arabic alphabets as well as Arabic numerals. The word ‘uniform’ is used because of avoiding curved segments. The first segmented display unit for Arabic characters in the world covered only the isolated form and did not follow any base line to display a sequence of characters. This work extends the capability to represent all the forms of Arabic characters and follows a base line to represent a sequence of characters. Here a grid structure of 25 non-overlapping segments has been discovered. There can be 109 alphanumeric characters (at least 99 characters such as isolated form- 30, final form-29, medial form- 21, initial form- 20; and 10 numerals) to be displayed and 7-bit input is used to represent each character. After analyzing appropriate segments to be activated for every character, respective logic functions of all segments have been derived to display the entire set of Arabic alphanumeric characters.