How do you break words across lines in Arabic?

Question

I have been searching for this for a few hours today and haven't found anything but this really, well maybe this is as close as it gets. Just found this, too, which is nice.

I've asked this on the Islam SE about the ancient Quran, because they may know based on the detailed writings of the prophets and such perhaps some rules which could be insightful. But I wanted to ask here a more broad version because in terms of Linguistics, this could apply cross-culturally focusing on Arabic Orthography's use.

My question is, how do you break words across lines in the Arabic script? What is acceptable practice in various languages, specifically the early Arabic of the Quran (Kufic script), but also modern Arabic, Urdu, Farsi/Dari (Persian), etc. How do you split a word into two pieces, essentially, using the Arabic script?

Answer 1

You don't break words in Arabic. Instead of breaking words, the Arabic script uses optional stretching of words to justify text columns. You can stretch the inter-letter joins and also some individual letters (especially the letter kaf). The feature is briefly mentioned in §8.5 of the ArabTeX manual and described in any decent introduction to the Arabic script.

EDIT: Two more references on Arabic typesetting for your entertainment Jabri: The Arabi system and Haralambous: Infrastructure for high-quality Arabic typesetting. The latter reference contains an interesting note: While the Arabic language isn't hyphenated, Uighur written in the Arabic script is hyphenated (with an example given).

Answer 2

you can break using javascript

var string = document.getElementById("field").value;

string.split('');

console.log(string); Array.from(string);

var bb = Object.assign([], string); console.log(bb);

cleanArray = bb.filter(function () { return true });

  var filtered = bb.filter(function (el) { 
            return el != null; });

console.log(filtered); var bb = bb.toString();

console.log(bb); bb = bb.replace(",","");

var stringWithoutCommas = bb.replace(/,/g, ' ');

console.log(stringWithoutCommas);