Reviewing khutbah slides before Friday

How the file becomes slides

On the Khutbah tab, choose the khutbah file — a Word file (.docx) or a PDF. Titles, dates, section headings, and body paragraphs each become their own slide. Each slide is shown on one line in the review box, tagged with its type: [DATE_SLIDE], [TITLE_SLIDE], [HEADER], or [BODY] (a line with no tag at all is treated as [BODY]).

The file is read in your browser and is not uploaded or stored anywhere — only the slides you save are kept.

Word is the better choice when you have it. With a Word file, a paragraph that is too long for the caption bar is broken automatically — at the end of a sentence where it can, otherwise at a comma or other natural pause — so every line fits the display. Only .docx is accepted: if the file is an older .doc or is password-protected, save it as a .docx without a password and upload that. If you see a "damaged file" message, open the file in Word and save it again as a .docx.

Arabic in a Word file, and Arabic in a PDF

From a Word file, the Arabic — the opening formula, salawat, the closing dua and any other Arabic passage typed into the document — arrives as real Arabic text, ready to review. Spelling and diacritics (tashkeel) are left exactly as they are in the file; the only change is that the stretched-out letter lines Word adds to justify a line (tatweel) are shortened to one.

A Quran verse that was pasted into the Word file as a picture can't be read as text. That is fine for verses cited by surah and verse (see "Quran citations" below), because those get their Arabic from the Quran Foundation instead. Any other Arabic that exists only as a picture will be missing from the review box, so read through the slides before saving.

From a PDF, Arabic still has to be pasted in by hand. Automated extraction of Arabic text from these PDFs isn't reliable — the character order can come out scrambled. Rather than risk showing garbled Arabic on the display, every Arabic passage in a PDF comes through as a placeholder instead:

Open the original PDF to the page number named in the placeholder, copy the Arabic text, and paste it directly over the placeholder in the review box.

If you paste text that spans multiple lines in the PDF, Awqōt automatically joins it into one flowing line as you paste — so it doesn't accidentally get split into several unrelated slides.

Adjusting text size

The review box has two magnifying-glass buttons above it — the smaller one shrinks the text, the bigger one enlarges it — handy for checking pasted Arabic with diacritics (tashkeel), which can be hard to read at the default size. It only affects this one box, not the rest of the page, and your chosen size is remembered the next time you come back to review a khutbah.

This is separate from what the congregation sees on the display — the subtitle text size there is fixed, not adjustable per khutbah, since it's tuned against a line and character limit so text never overflows the display. Zooming in the review box only changes how it looks while you're checking it.

Quran citations

When the khutbah references a specific verse — for example, "As He reminds us in Surah Ar-Rahman, verse 60" — that reference is pulled out onto its own [QURAN_CITATION] line, and Awqōt looks up the Arabic verse text automatically from the Quran Foundation. The Arabic does not come from your Word file or PDF — a Word file often has the verse only as a picture — so you'll see the fetched Arabic shown alongside the citation in the review page so you can confirm it's correct before saving.

A range such as "Surah Taha, verses 67–68" is split into one [QURAN_CITATION] line per verse (Surah Taha, verse 67, then Surah Taha, verse 68), each with its own fetched Arabic. A range of more than 10 verses is not turned into citation slides automatically; add the lines you want by hand, one verse per line.

A [QURAN_CITATION] line should contain only the reference itself — the sentence introducing it belongs on its own [BODY] line right before it, since that's what the congregation reads on screen; the citation line itself is replaced by the fetched Arabic verse.

Editing before you save

You can edit freely in the review box — fix a typo, merge two slides, split one, or rewrite a sentence. Your line breaks become the final slide boundaries exactly as typed; nothing gets re-packed or re-split once you've started editing.

Below the review box, a preview shows one slide at a time, styled exactly as it will appear on the kiosk display's subtitle bar — use ‹ Prev / Next ›, or Go to slide to jump straight to one. See What the congregation sees for why long lines wrap the way they do.

Saving

Saving publishes immediately to whatever's live on the display — there's no separate confirmation step, so it's worth reviewing carefully before you click Save khutbah.

If any placeholder hasn't been replaced yet, saving is blocked and you'll see exactly which slide numbers still need attention.