[Savannah-register-public] [task #6156] Submission of Afghan Calendar Project

[M. Emal Alekozai]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?6156>

                 Summary: Submission of Afghan Calendar Project
                 Project: Savannah Administration
            Submitted by: memala
            Submitted on: Tuesday 11/28/2006 at 11:31
         Should Start On: Tuesday 11/28/2006 at 00:00
   Should be Finished on: Friday 12/08/2006 at 00:00
                Category: Project Approval
                Priority: 5 - Normal
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
        Percent Complete: 0%
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
                  Effort: 0.00

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Details:

A new project has been registered at Savannah 
This project account will remain inactive until a site admin approves or
discards the registration.


= Registration Administration =

While this item will be useful to track the registration process, *approving
or discarding the registration must be done using the specific Group
Administration
<https://savannah.gnu.org/siteadmin/groupedit.php?group_id=8949> page*,
accessible only to site administrators, effectively *logged as site
administrators* (superuser):

* Group Administration
<https://savannah.gnu.org/siteadmin/groupedit.php?group_id=8949>


= Registration Details =

* Name: *Afghan Calendar Project*
* System Name:  *afghancalendar*
* Type: non-GNU software &amp; documentation
* License: GNU Free Documentation License

----

==== Description: ====
AFGHAN CALENDAR PROJECT:

INTRODUCTION:
==============
In Afghanistan three calendars are used parallel:  “Islamic sun
calendar”, “Islamic lunar calendar”
 and the “Gregorian sun calendar”.
The official afghan calendar is the “Islamic sun calendar” (article 18 of
the Afghan constitution [1], [2] p. 23). In Europe and America the calendar is
based on the “Gregorian sun calendar”. In several Arabic countries only
the “Islamic lunar calendar” is used. As far as I now Afghanistan is the
only country which uses the “Islamic sun calendar”.  Iran has a similar
calendar like Afghanistan but the leap days differ.  As far as I know there
exists no free implementation of the afghan “Islamic sun calendar”. Only
the UNDP [3] publishes a quite simple version of the afghan “Islamic sun
calendar”.
The aim of my project is to create afghan “Islamic sun calendar” in
several languages (like English, German, Persian and Pashto). Each Calendar
will contain the afghan holidays and the holiday of a second country. E.g.
the British version of the afghan calendar will contain beside the afghan
holidays also the corresponding British holidays. For every month there will
be a short list of historical events in Persian and a second language (for
example in English).

The historical dates are verified against two of the following sources:
- several Wikepedia article
- encyclopedia Britannica
- Historical Dictionary of Afghanistan (ISBN: 081084852X) [4]

1:
http://www.jemb.org/eng/Legal%20Framework/Legislation%20of%20Reference/Constitution/Constitution%20(English).pdf
2: http://www.evertype.com/standards/af/af-locales.pdf
3: http://www.aims.org.af/afg/1384_calendar.pdf
4:
http://www.amazon.com/Historical-Dictionary-Afghanistan-Dictionaries-Oceania/dp/081084852X

WHY HELPFUL:
=============
Only the UNDP [3] publishes a quite simple version of the afghan “Islamic
sun calendar”. This calendar is only localized for English and not into
other languages like German. It also don't contains the holidays of the other
countries (like US, Germany etc.). Several NGO which work in Afghanistan have
problems with the conversion from Gregorian dates (expecially the holiday) to
the correct afghan “Islamic sun calendar” date. This calendar would be
helpful in such cases.


WHY SHOULD THE PROJECT BE HOSTED ON SAVANAH:
==============================================
Till know I have hosted my open source projects on my personal Homepage [5]
e.g. the “Afghan keymaps for Linux/ Unix” [6].  I plan to create several
localized versions of the calendar for every year. Each will have a size of
several Mb's. This will exceed the available web space and web traffic on  my
personal homepage. therefore I would like to host the project on Savannah.\

[5] http://www.alekozai.com
[6] http://www.alekozai.com/en/afghanKeymaps.php


CURRENT STATE:
==============
The calendar is till know in a early development state. A lot of time was
used to find the proper open source fonts and libraries for the date
conversion. At the moment there is no proper code available. It is planed to
publish the first working version on February 2007 (the next afghan year 1386
will start at the 21. of march 2007).  


HOW THE CALENDAR IS CREATED:
=============================
A simple Perl script will create dynamically the calendar with the localized
holidays in the OpenOffice xml format.  The Calendar will then be exported to
the PDF format with OpenOffice. 
Several additional Open source fonts, libraries are used for creating the
calendar:

- Arabic fonts: Khotat project
http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Khotot

- Latin fonts: DejaVu project
http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

- Conversion from Gregorien sun calendar to islamic lunar calendar is done by
the ITL project
http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=ITL

- Historical dates are stored in a sqlite database:
http://www.sqlite.org/

- localized holidays are created with the Perl module “Date::Calendar”
http://search.cpan.org/~stbey/Date-Calc-5.4/Calendar.pod



==== Other Software Required: ====
The calendar will be available in the PDF format, therefore it will depend on
a PDF viewer like XPDF [7].
7: http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/






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