Reviewing khutbah slides before Friday
For asatizah reviewing a khutbah before it goes live on the display — how the PDF becomes slides, what needs your attention, and what happens when you save.
Quick answer
When the mosque uploads that week's khutbah PDF, Awqōt splits it into slides automatically — but it cannot reliably extract Arabic text from the PDF, so every Arabic passage is replaced with a placeholder telling you which PDF page to copy it from. Saving is blocked until every placeholder has been replaced with real, pasted Arabic.
How the PDF becomes slides
Once the khutbah PDF is uploaded, its English text is broken into slides automatically — 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]).
Arabic passages need 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 the khutbah — the opening formula, salawat, Quranic framing, the closing dua — comes through as a placeholder instead:
>>> PASTE ARABIC TEXT HERE — copy directly from khutbah PDF, page 4 <<<
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.
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. You'll see the fetched Arabic shown alongside the citation in the review page so you can confirm it's correct before saving.
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.
Common questions
Why can't Awqōt just extract the Arabic automatically?
We looked into this closely, including testing an OCR-based approach, and neither reliably preserves correct Arabic character order for these PDFs. Rather than risk showing incorrect Arabic live during a khutbah, we ask for it to be pasted in directly instead.
What if I accidentally save with a placeholder still in it?
Saving is blocked entirely while any placeholder remains — you'll be shown which slide numbers still need the real Arabic pasted in before you can save.
Still stuck?
The Awqōt team is happy to help with khutbah review.