Over the past few weeks Quran Pages for a number of Surahs have been released (mashAllah). So thought now was a good time to discuss the format & provide a quick explanation of the layout of Quran Page documents. To get started let’s have a look at a sample document and break down the different pieces (anatomy):
- A – Title: ‘Quran’
- B – Is a ‘QuickLook‘ box. Here you can very quickly see different information and statistic about the Surah (Chapter)
- i. The top left quadrant is the Surah Number
- ii. The top right quadrant is the Number of Verses in the Surah
- iii. The bottom left quadrant is the Juz (Part) Number
- iv. The bottom right quadrant indicates whether the Surah contains a Sajdah (Prostration of Recitation)
- C – This area is a virtual progress bar – sort of like a linear gauge. The top most horizontal line in the document indicates the Start of the Quran (i.e. Verse 1), whilst the bottom most horizontal line in the document indicated the End of the Quran (i.e. Verse 6236). Everything in between is a linear scale. So in each Quran Page (pdf) document you will see an Indicator positioned within the highlighted area (C), which will visually illustrate the relative position of the Surah in relation to the entire Quran. For example, the Indicator for Surah [1] will be at the top of the page adjacent to the top most horizontal line, whilst the Indicator for the last Surah [114] will be at the very bottom of the document, adjacent to the bottom most horizontal line. Indicators for Surah’s in between are scaled proportionally to fall into their relative position within the Quran. This way you can very quickly get an idea of where in the Quran you actually are (click on the following image to see what I mean).
Now the Indicator serves a dual purpose, apart from just (visually) illustrating the position of the Surah in the Quran, it also indicates where the Surah was revealed. There are two Indicator Symbols used:
- Square (color black) – This indicates the Surah was revealed in Mecca (Makkah)
- Circle (color blue) – This indicates the Surah was revealed in Medina (Al-Madinah)
- D – Name of the Surah
- E – English translation of the Name of the Surah
- F – Verse numbers
- G – The Wahy Project name
- H – Quran Page Document ID followed by a Revision number. Revision 0 refers to the originally released document.
- I – Quran text (arabic) in either an Indo/Pak script or Uthmani script. A quick tip, documents with a 3000 series number for the Document ID will be the Indo/Pak script, whilst documents with a 4000 series number for the Document ID will be the Uthmani script
Now there is a special hidden feature that hasn’t been mentioned above. From the latest Quran Page document (released last Friday) and moving forward each Quran Page pdf will have Layers in it. So you are probably asking yourself what this means? Well, this will allow you to be able to either Show or Hide particular Verses – this is great if you are trying to learn the Verse and need to test yourself. InshAllah I will have a separate post of how to use this Layer functionality in the near future – so stay tuned.
Page
Now apart from the Quran Pages document format above which relates to the released pdf file, the associated Page also has some features:
- An image of the Arabic text (if you click this it will take you to a high resolution version) that you can download.
- Audio for each verse
- Translation (English)
- A link to the pdf (for both Indo/Pak and Uthmani scripts)
- A link to the Audio (mp3) files (note – each audio file has the correct metadata set to make it easy to import into your favorite player, e.g. iTunes)
- Checksum (or Hash) of the files to verify integrity – [ md5 | sha1 ]
Now the Indicator serves a dual purpose, apart from just (visually) illustrating the position of the Surah in the Quran, it also indicates where the Surah was revealed. There are two Indicator Symbols used:
The Wahy Project 