Features

Current Features

  • Read Quran Online

    This site allows you to read the Quran online. You can choose which surah to read and then the ayahs for that surah will be displayed 10 at a time.

  • Quran in Arabic text

    The Quran is displayed in Unicode text rather than the more typical image format. This allows users to cut-and-paste ayahs into word processors or other files for their own use. It also makes the display more flexible since the browser can wrap the text at any word rather than having to conform to the dimensions of the image.

  • Search Capabilities

    The site allows you to search through the notesets (translations, commentaries, personal notes) and each search result links back to the verse the note is related to. The format of the search string allows AND, OR, and NOT operations, as well as, exact phrase searches.

  • Links to every verse

    The site provides the ability to link to any particular verse in the Quran. Links are provided on each verse that can be copied and used in emails or other webpages.

  • Customizable Display

    The site allows each user to customize a few important display settings to make the site as attractive as possible to that user. The most important settings and the ones that are customizable are the size of the screen and the Arabic fonts used, because Arabic text is notoriously difficult to read on-line.

  • Free, Downloadable Fonts

    The site offers 45 different TrueType Arabic fonts to be used on the site, completely free of charge. They can be used outside of the site, as well, on any system that can read TrueType fonts, including Windows and Macintosh computers.

  • Commentaries/Translations

    The site offers several commentaries/translations of the Quran for the user to view as notesets. The following is a list of the currently available notesets:

    • De Heilige Koran (Dutch)
    • Le Saint Coran by Muhammad Hamidullah (French)
    • Tafsir Jalalayn by Jalal al-Din Al-Mahilli and Jalal al-Din Al-Suyuti (Arabic)
    • The Holy Quran by Maulvi Sher Ali (English)
    • The Meaning of the Glorious Quran by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (English)
    • The Meaning of the Holy Quran by Yusuf Ali (English)
    • The Noble Quran by Al-Hilali (English)
    • Qaribullah (English)
    • English & Turkish transliteration
    • Albanian
    • Azerbaijani
    • Bosnian
    • Finnish
    • 2 German translations
    • Italian
    • Polish
    • Portugese
    • Russian
    • Spanish
    • Turkish translations by Yazir, Ozturk and Diyanet
    • Farsi
    • Thai
    • 2 Chinese translations
    • Indonesian
    • Japanese
    • Melayu
    • Swahili

    All of these titles were taken from other sites around the web and can be found with minimal effort with a simple search. The texts that had been available here and are no longer here were left out of this launch because there were errors in my copies of those texts that could not be resolved quickly. I will work to correct those problems and collect other translations/interpretations as I find them. If you know of one that you'd like to see here, let me know where I can find it.

  • Personal Noteset

    The site allows each user that creates an account to record their own notes for each ayah in a personal noteset. Any number of notes can be recorded for each ayah. Labels can also be applied to each note so that notes can be organized and related to each other. The display settings allow you to filter the notes that you see by label so that only those notes that have the label you wish to see shows up.

  • Noteset Backups

    The site allows each user to make backups of their notesets for their own safekeeping. XML backups are useful in recreating your data on the website, while the Text backups allow you to use your data outside of the website.

  • Simultaneous Noteset Display

    The site allows the user to view multiple notesets (translations/interpretations) of the Qur'ran for each ayah simultaneously. This will help users compare different translations/interpretations of each ayah more effectively.

    • Future/Planned Features

  • Multiple Personal Notesets

    Not sure if this is really necessary since the user can create any number of notes and can organize those notes through labels, but its certainly an option.

  • Shared/public Notesets

    If people actually start using the noteset feature, it may be interesting to let people "publish" their notes so that others can read them. Possible variations include only making the notes public to particular users, and making notes public by label. The latter option might be especially important if we don't end up doing the multiple notesets, since you might not want to make all of your notes public.

  • Multi-lingual Interface

    Seeing as how there are several translations on this site that would attract users that don't necessarily speak English as their first language, it might be nice to have the entire interface internationalized.

    • Custom Font Definition for Notesets

    This turned out to be meaningful after looking at how the Jalalayn tafsir showed up one the site. It could use some custom settings for its font for the same reason that the other Arabic text gets it, and while we're at it, we might as well offer it for all the notesets, right?

  • Fancy, AJAX UI

    I think AJAX stuff can get really overdone, but it has some use, so it might be worthwhile to see if it can't spice up the site a bit, especially if it can make taking notes easier and faster.

  • More Color Schemes

    The color scheme, or "skin", stuff has some potential, I think, but I don't have the time or energy to develop a lot of them now. If the site gets a lot of users and people are interested in some other options, I might revisit this.

  • Bookmarks

    If the site is being used primarily to read the Quran, it might be nice to be able to automatically return wherever you left off, either by explicitly marking the verse to return to or automatically remembering the last page that was displayed for each user / browser.

  • More Translations/Interpretations

    There are lots of translations available online that aren't represented here. Some of them were on the old almushaf.com site, but there were errors in my copies of those texts. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to fix those and bring in some others as well. The ones I have my sights on include: English translations by Shakir, Palmer, Rashid Al-Khalifah, and Free-Minds, and tafsir from Qurtubi.