Printing Arabic text using dot matrix printers requires special software or firmware. First, character shapes must be developed and loaded into the printer- ’s memory. Second, since an Arabic letter can have up to four different shapes depending on its position in the word, a program must be developed to determine which shape of a character is to be printed. This process is called contextual analysis. Dot matrix printers have a character set of 128 codes, including control codes, which implies that not all possible shapes of the Arabic alphabet can be loaded into the printer’s memory. There are at least two solutions to this problem. One is to delete some of the shapes of certain characters. The other solution involves decomposing some of the shapes into common parts that can be combined to form the desired shape. The author’s approach is to use a combination of the two solutions. The result of this study is the development of two programs. One program is used to print Arabic text containing English text. The second program prints English text containing Arabic text. The programs change the font of the printer according to the type of text. Both programs also perform contextual analysis of Arabic text.

The paper does not introduce a new technique for printing Arabic text. It simply describes the application of an already existing technique called contextual analysis [1]. Moreover, this is not the first time printing of Arabic text with dot matrix printers has been done; it was achieved some time ago and is now widely available with commercial terminals.