[NTG-context] Arabic-utf-8 (plus a sample)

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. Now all of the Arabic charachters in utf-8 can be represented by extended ascii. I need something like this, that converts every extended ascii representation of Arabic utf-8 into a Latin transcription: ا => A ب => b ج => j د => d ه => h و => w ز => z If someone could write a perl script that can accomplish the above conversion, I can manually fill in the rest of the script. Basically I use a modified version of the ArabTeX transcription. Here is a "gift" in return: a sample utf-8 Arabic file that can be processed by Aleph/(e-)Omega in ConTeXt (you will probably need to dvips this, though some dvi-viewers can do the postscript/16-bit thing): ============================================== \hoffset=0pt % for Omega bug: has this been fixed? \def\ArabicUTF{\ocp\UTFArUni=inutf8 %% in88596 %\ocp\UTFArUni=in88596 \ocp\UniCUni=uni2cuni \ocp\CUniArab=cuni2oar \ocplist\UTFArOCP= \addbeforeocplist 1 \UTFArUni \addbeforeocplist 1 \UniCUni \addbeforeocplist 1 \CUniArab \nullocplist \pushocplist\UTFArOCP} \input m-gamma.tex \input type-omg.tex \switchtobodyfont[omarb,12pt] % \textdir TRT% \pardir TRT% \ArabicUTF \starttext ، ؛ ؟ ء آ أ ؤ إ ئ ا ب ة ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ـ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ى ي \blank[big] %ً ٌ ٍ َ ُ ِ ّ ْ ٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩ ٪ ٫ ٬ ٰ ٱ ٲ ٳ ٴ ٵ ٶ ٷ ٸ ٹ ٺ ٻ ټ ٽ پ ٿ ڀ ځ ڂ ڃ ڄ څ چ ڇ ڈ ډ ڊ ڋ ڌ ڍ ڎ ڏ ڐ ڑ ڒ ړ ڔ ڕ ږ ڗ ژ ڙ ښ ڛ ڜ ڝ ڞ ڟ ڢ ڡ ڢ ڣ ڤ ڥ ڦ ڧ ڨ ک ڪ ګ ڬ ڭ ڮ گ ڰ ڱ ڲ ڳ ڴ ڵ ڶ ڷ ں ڻ ڼ ھ ۀ ہ ۃ ۄ ۅ ۆ ۇ ۈ ۉ ۊ ۋ ی ې ۑ ے ۓ ۔ ە ۰ ۱ ۲ ۳ ۴ ۵ ۶ ۷ ۸ ۹ \blank[big] ـً ـٌ ـٍ ـَ ـُ ـِ ـّ ـْ ـٰ ا ب ج د ه و ز \stoptext ============================================== Best Idris -- Professor Idris Samawi Hamid Department of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523