I am trying to figure out how the original (Kufic Script) Quran would have handled the case of words at the end of the line being too long to fit. In English, we sometimes add hyphenation like this:
This is a really long sentence with lots of extreme-
ly long words, of course.
But what do you do in Arabic? This seems to be an open problem for the W3C:
ISSUE 18
Does Arabic script text use hyphenation? If so, is the use of hyphenation language-specific?
What are the rules? Are there any general rules that transcend all languages?
I am in particular wondering about the original Quran, which didn't have vowels or diacritics of any kind, but seems to have used spaces at least between words. I would like to know what to do when the word is too long at the end of the line. Can you just "break" the word wherever? Or are there specific rules on how it can break? In English, some "breaks" are more preferred over others, some breaks wouldn't make much sense:
This is a really long sentence with lots of e-
xtremely long words.
This is a really long sentence with lots of extremel
-y long words.
This is a really lon-
g sentence with lots o-
f extremely long words.
I don't know what the rules are even for English (in detail), but I'm wondering (a) if there are detailed rules for this written down somewhere for Arabic (specifically the early Kufic script Quran), and (b) if so, generally what they are and where I can find more info. If there aren't, then what is the convention used in the original Qurans? Right now I am just cutting the word off it's too long right at the "too long" point, and moving to the next line, but sometimes this means 1 letter is on the next line which seems like a no-no.