Reading the Quran with tajweed colour

A colour coded mushaf paints the places where a tajweed rule applies, and uses the colour to say which rule it is. It is a map, not a teacher. It can show you that an ikhfa begins on this letter and ends on that one, every time, on every page, without you having to remember the list of fifteen letters that triggers it. It cannot make the sound for you and it cannot tell you whether you made it correctly.

What the colours mark, and what they do not

Every coloured span in a tajweed mushaf is a claim about position: a rule starts here and stops there. The colour is the rule's name in a form you can read at speed. That is genuinely useful, because tajweed rules are conditional (this letter, after that letter, when the first carries no vowel) and a beginner spends most of their attention on spotting the condition rather than on producing the sound.

What no colour can carry is the sound itself: how far back in the throat, how long a hold, how heavy. That is why every honest description of a colour coded mushaf ends in the same place, and ours does too: the colour shortens the search, and a teacher who can hear you does the rest.

20 rules, 87,015 marked spans

The corpus behind the colouring marks 87,015 spans across the 6,236 ayat of the Quran, in 20 classes. The distribution is lopsided in a way worth knowing before you start: a handful of rules account for most of the page, and several you will meet only a few times in a lifetime of reading.

Two numbers out of that census are worth carrying around, because they tell you what reading with colour is actually like before you try it. The first is density: 87,015 spans over 6,236 ayat is about 14.0 marks in the average ayah, so a coloured page is not lightly dotted, it is patterned. The second is the lopsidedness: the five most common classes alone are 58 per cent of every mark in the book, while the three rarest come to 200 spans between them in the whole Quran. Learn the top of that list and most of a page stops being new; the bottom of it you may not meet for a year.

The full table of all 20, with the count for each and a real ayah rendered in colour for every one of them, is on our tajweed rules lesson. That page needs no app and no account: the colour renders in your browser.

See the colouring before you install anything

This is the part we would want if we were choosing. You do not have to take a screenshot's word for how a colour coded mushaf reads, because the same corpus the app uses is rendered on this website. Open the lesson, pick any of the twenty ayat, and decide whether reading that way suits you. If it does not, you have saved yourself an install.

Whether the colours are actually readable

Colour coding has an accessibility problem that almost nobody publishes: pale marks on near white paper. Our own palette had it. On 20 August 2026 the light palette was measured against the three light surfaces the app renders tajweed on, and 13 of its 21 rule keys fell below the 4.5:1 contrast ratio that ordinary body text is held to. Six were below even the 3:1 floor for large text. The most common mark in the whole Quran, hamzat wasl, was among them.

What was done is as narrow as the finding: each failing colour kept its hue and its saturation exactly and was darkened by the smallest amount that cleared 4.5:1 on the darkest of the three surfaces, so clearing that one cleared all three. The eight that already passed were not touched, and the dark palette was left byte for byte as it was. Two pairs needed a second pass so that neighbouring rules stay tellable apart, and one of those pairs ended up closer together than before. That regression is written down in the app's own source beside the colour it affects rather than quietly absorbed.

We are telling you this because it is the kind of thing a feature list never contains, and because it is checkable: the numbers, the surfaces and the before and after values are in the palette file itself. Colour is still not the only cue you should depend on, which is why the legend on the lesson page names every rule in words as well.

How to switch it on

In the app it is one row. Settings, then Reading Preferences, then Arabic Script: the colour coded Tajweed script sits in that list beside Uthmani and Indo-Pak. There is also a colour coded Tajweed page image mushaf among the 10 ways to read the mushaf, for readers who want the printed page rather than a reflowing one.

Three different things are sold as "Quran with tajweed"

This is the part that costs people money and storage, and almost nobody writes it down. The phrase covers three quite different products, and which one you have decides what you can do with it.

1. A coloured script. The text is rendered live from a marked corpus, so the colour sits on real, selectable, searchable characters: you can change the size, and the letters stay letters rather than becoming a picture of letters. This is the kind Quran Habit ships inside the app, so it needs no download and no connection.
2. A coloured font mushaf. The printed page is rebuilt from a per page font so the line breaks match a real edition, with the colour carried in the glyphs. It keeps the layout a memoriser depends on and costs a download.
3. A coloured page image. A scan of a printed coloured mushaf. It is the most faithful to the paper and the least useful to software: an image cannot be searched, resized past a point, or read out, because there is no text in it at all.

Quran Habit carries all three, which is why the number of mushaf choices in it is 10 rather than one, and why "does it have tajweed" is not a yes or no question about any app. If you are choosing, the question underneath it is what you want the colour FOR: learning the rules wants the script, memorising a page wants the layout, and wanting the exact paper you own wants the image.

What it costs, and what it will not do

The tajweed colouring is free to every reader of the app, whether or not they have ever paid, alongside the Quran text, the translations, the recitations, the mushaf page view and the offline downloads. That was measured against the app's own source on 10 September 2026 rather than read off a marketing page, and it is written out with the three things a purchase does change on our licences page.

The refusal matters as much. Quran Habit has no speech recognition of any kind. It never listens to you recite, it will never tell you that a letter was wrong, and it does not grade a recitation. If a checker is what you are after, the colouring is not a substitute for one and we would rather you learned that here.

The tajweed corpus ships inside the app, so the colouring works with the connection off in the same way the Uthmani and Indo-Pak texts do.

Where to go next

• The tajweed rules lesson: the seven rule families, all 20 classes with their counts, the four madds from two counts to six, and twenty real ayat in colour.
• The reading ladder from the Arabic alphabet upward, if the letters themselves are still new.
• The twelve checks we would run on any Quran app, of which the script question is one.
• How to memorise the Quran, where the fixed layout a coloured font mushaf keeps is worth more than the colour is.
• The Quran on this site, 114 surahs with translation and audio, nothing to install, and a reciter on every one of them if you would rather hear the rule than read it.

Counts on this page come from the same census the lesson page renders, which is asserted against the shipped tajweed corpus at build time and fails the build if the classes and the total disagree. The contrast figures are the 20 August 2026 measurement recorded in the app's own palette file. Quran Habit reached Google Play on 5 September 2026 and the App Store on 7 September 2026.

Questions

What do the tajweed colours actually mark?

Places, not sounds. A coloured span tells you that a rule applies from here to here, and the colour says which rule. It cannot tell you how the sound is made, how long to hold it or whether you made it correctly, and no app on any platform can.

How many rules are marked?

20 rule classes across 87,015 marked spans in the 6,236 ayat of the Quran, counted from the same corpus the app renders. The most common by a distance is hamzat al wasl at 13,252 spans; the rarest is idgham mutaqaribayn at 13.

Can I see the colouring before I install anything?

Yes. Our tajweed rules lesson at /en/learn/tajweed-rules/ renders twenty real ayat in colour in the browser, one for each rule, with the full legend. Nothing to install and no account.

What does a purchase change about the colouring?

Nothing at all, and the section above says where that was measured. What a purchase does change, in full, is three things that have nothing to do with reading: a badge beside your name on the leaderboard, your full name where a free reader’s is shortened, and a doubled daily gem rate outside Ramadan. None of them touches a letter of the text.

Are the colours readable for everyone?

They are better than they were, and we can say exactly how much. On 20 August 2026 the light palette was measured against the three light surfaces the app renders tajweed on and 13 of 21 rule keys fell below the 4.5:1 contrast floor, six of them below even the 3:1 large text floor. Each failing colour kept its hue and saturation and was darkened by the smallest amount that cleared 4.5:1. Colour is still not the only cue you should rely on, which is why the legend names every rule in words.

How do I turn it on?

Settings, then Reading Preferences, then Arabic Script. The colour coded Tajweed script sits in that list beside Uthmani and Indo-Pak, and there is a colour coded Tajweed page image mushaf among the ten ways to read the mushaf as well.

Can I learn tajweed from an app?

You can learn the names, the rules and where each one applies, and colour is a genuinely good way to do that because it puts the rule on the word instead of in a table. The sound itself comes from a teacher who can hear you. We say this plainly because the app has no speech recognition and never will pretend to grade your recitation.

If no app can hear me, what is colour actually for?

Finding the rule, not making the sound. Tajweed rules are conditional, so a beginner spends most of their attention hunting for the condition rather than producing the letter, and colour takes that search away: the rule is on the word instead of in a table you are trying to recall mid-line. Once you stop needing the colour to find an ikhfa, you have learned the thing the colour was teaching, and you can switch back to plain Uthmani.

Does the tajweed script work offline?

Yes. The tajweed corpus ships inside the app in the same way the Uthmani and Indo-Pak texts do, so it needs no download and no connection. The colour coded page image mushaf is a download, like every page image set.

Where does the rule markup come from?

From an open tajweed corpus that marks each span with the rule class it belongs to, anchored to the KFGQPC Uthmani text the app renders. Our licences page names the source for every piece of data on this site and in the app, including the ones where the permission is still being chased.