On Sat, 5 Jun 2004, Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:
Hi gang,
For Arabic we use a Latin transcription in Aleph/(e-)Omega (or even ArabTeX) unless one of the encoding filters like utf-8 is used. Even for utf-8 files, however, it would be very useful to be able to convert a utf-8 file to Latin transcription for further processing by Aleph/(e-)Omega. For example, adding diacritics is much easier to do in Latin than in an Arabic script editor because Latin transcription is one-dimensional and adding diacritics to Arabic is a 2-dimen affair.
The best thing would be a perl script but I don't know perl at all (except to run some some precreated scripts). If someone out of the kindness of their heart could write a short and simple script for just seven characters I could do the rest myself and present it back here.
Can you use (or extend) GNU recode? It does include support for utf-8 and several TeX encodings.