Re: Arabic-utf-8 (plus a sample)

["George N. White III" <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>]

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.

From the manual: "It is easy for a programmer to add a new charset to 
`recode'.  All it requires is making a few functions kept in a single `.c' 
file, adjusting `Makefile.am' and remaking `recode'."

-- 
   George N. White III <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>
   Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada