Writing Arabic with Latin letters

The most natural way to write Arabic is of course with Arabic letters. But sometimes we, in particular academics, want to write Arabic with Latin characters - e.g. to add an Arabic word or title into an English text - but without sacrificing precision. Since Arabic has more consonants than English, we then need to add some special letters; such as a dot below (or above) some consonants, or to add a line above long vowels. We call these marks "diacritics". How can do we this on a Mac or PC?

Well, that depends on what kind of computer and software you use. I have no personal experience with PCs and Windows, but have added below some information from people who use such computers. As for Macintosh users, you can write transliteration both on older and on current Macs, but there are some differences between recent and older software, so you may have to be aware of some details. Let us first, however, look at some of the basics.

What is it?

For that purpose, then, we generally use standard English characters which we modify by adding a dot or a line, a diacritic, to them. This allows the specialist to know what its Arabic origin is (a sad, not a sin), while the non-specialist will recognize its approximate pronunciation ("s" in both cases). Exactly what diacritics we use, varies: it is a matter of intense academic debates what kind of transliteration system is "most correct". If your web browser allows it, you can see the difference between khārjah, ḫārǧa^t and jârŷa, the same name in three different transliteration systems. As a writer, you may choose your own - so you can control how many diacritic characters you need - or a publisher may impose a system on you, in which case, you may need access to more than you normally write.

However that may be, the important point is that the diacritic character, the "s with dot" - emphatic s - is a fully separate character, not just an "s" with an extra. Not just linguistically, but also on the computer: We see it as a kind of s, but for the computer, the "s" and the "s-dot" have no relation to each other at all. It is simply that when the programmer drew the s-dot character, he made it resemble the s, before adding the dot.

How do we get it?

In order to type these letters, you need two things:

• A font that contains these diacritic characters.
• A keyboard layout that lets you type them, in the fonts that contain them.

Evidently, not every font has these characters we need, the vast majority do not. But, on modern computers (Mac and Windows) there will normally be at least one that does. On the most recent Macs, you can get by fine with Times and Helvetica, and all current Macs have a standard font called Lucida Grande with a huge variety of diacritics. On most Windows machines, you will find a font called Arial Unicode MS with even more (and in Vista or Windows 7, the regular Times New Roman as well as half a dozen other fonts contain what we want). However, you may not want to be limited to these fonts, and may want to install more fonts that also contain these diacritics.

You can find a number of such fonts on the Internet, which you can download and install on your computer (see below for a list). You will find that many of them have the term Unicode in their name, as you saw in Arial above. By "Unicode" is normally meant that the font contains more characters than the regular a-z of English and West European accents, it kind of means "Exotic Alternative". Technically, Unicode is just an agreement between computer makers on how their machines should treat non-Western characters. It "codifies" characters in all kinds of living and dead languages and scripts, including such specialist needs as our scientific transliteration characters. That is, it standarizes the computer's identification of each character.

When a font maker calls his font a "Unicode font", he thus means that there are some such exotic characters in his font, but exactly which ones he has put into his particular font is up to him. So not all "Unicode fonts" will have the characters we are looking for.
But today, a font that contains such non-Western characters should adhere to the Unicode system. Only a few years ago most did not, because Unicode fonts can become tremendously huge, and computer systems then could not handle so large fonts. So, on older Macs and PCs, you could not use large Unicode fonts. Instead, individuals "fixed" their own, smaller and private fonts that did not follow any standard. These worked (well) on their own machine, but not necessarily on any other - which created difficulties when you e.g. emailed a document to a colleague who did not have the same font as yourself. Happily, Unicode has put an end to this, or at least it has made it possible to end this so that we can treat transliteration diacritics just like any other texts.

A further step would be if all the most common fonts on all our machines actually included our characters, or at least that the fonts with the same name had the same characters on Mac and PC. That is not always true. Sometimes you can send a document with transliteration to a colleague, using e.g. Times New Roman, or another common font, and get a frantic message back saying that the "diacritics have disappeared". Tell him not to worry, the characters are there, but his machine has a different version of the same font, and that version does not contain these characters. If he sets the text in another font, the diacritics will magically reappear.

-- Some programs actually solve this problem of "missing characters" automatically: If a font lacks certain characters, the program will display that text in another font which does have them. Word will sometimes use the Mac's Times, so everything looks fine if the surrounding text is Times New Roman, they are virtually identical in appearance. Other programs will prefer the more ill-fitting Lucida Grande font, and in some cases you see only "empty boxes", and then you must choose a useful font yourself. -- Additionally, and unfortunately, while every modern computer follows the Unicode system, not every program does so: there was a cost of re-programming applications to accept the huge Unicode fonts, and many US or Western companies could not be bothered to take this cost. Most new programs today will work properly with such fonts, but there are still programs - in particular older ones - that do not "support" Unicode. They will display the fonts, but not these diacritic characters we need. But more and more are OK, so upgrading your programs will often make this problem disappear. --

How to type them

Well, so much for the first point, the fonts themselves. But they are not much good if we cannot type our "s with dot under". Clearly, there is no such "s-dot" key on our keyboard. So we must try to trick our keyboard into "producing" the diacritcs. The problem is just that there are only around 50 keys on the keyboard in front of you. By using the Shift key, the Option (or "Alt") key, and both of these together, we can quadruple that to about 200. But Lucida Grande has 2,000 different characters, and a really big font from 20,000 to 50,000. No way we can type all those with a regular keyboard.

One way to get at the special characters, is to display on-screen a huge "palette" of all characters in a font, and click on the one you want, so it is inserted into the text. Both Mac and Windows have such tools ("Character palette" and "Character map", respectively). But that is cumbersome. It is better to be able to type them directly with the keyboard, a bit like how we type upper-case letters by typing s with Shift down to get "S". Why not in the same way making Alt and s together produce "s-dot"?

That we can do if we allow our computer to switch between different keyboard layouts. Layouts are software settings that link the physical keys we press to particular characters on the screen. We are not stuck with just what is painted onto the plastic. Mac people know this, if we press the Alt key (or "Option" key as we call it) with e.g. "a", you can get an "å". Change the layout setting, and the Option-a combination will link to a different character in the font, such as ā - a long a. You can have many such alternative keyboard setting layouts on your computer, they are listed in a "keyboard" menu - often called the "flag" menu as it displays small flags. Adding one of our own geared towards our purposes, will let Option/Alt combinations type the diacritic characters we need. If, of course, the font we have selected contains such characters.

A Mac has pre-installed one or two such special layouts that allow access to some diacritics (Windows does not, but you can add one). But these are not geared particularly to Arabic transliteration. We may want something that gives easy access to our particular characters. Such exist, but here Mac and Windows must part ways. This is a Mac website, so we will spend most time on a Mac, before summing up the solutions I know of for the Windows people.

DIACRITICS ON A MAC

Writing transliteration on the Mac does not require anything extra if:

(a) Your computer system was bought or upgraded after May 2005.
(b) Your version of Microsoft Word / Office was bought after 2004.
(c) You have chosen the USA Extended keyboard layout in System Preferences (Language and Text / International).

That was the short answer. It may require some expansion:

Re: (a): In 2005, Apple introduced new versions of the standard fonts Times and Helvetica that contain [most of] the characters we need, as part of their operating system 10.4. If your Mac is slightly older, you will probably want to add some freeware or other fonts that have these characters. Read below for more about adding fonts for transliteration.

Re: (b): In 2004, Microsoft introduced its "Office 2004" package which could use these fonts. Older versions of Word could not. If you use an older Word, you have to check the solution below I have called "The Traditional Way". -- If you are not a Microsoft user (and why should you be?), the same applies, new programs and versions can most often use the modern fonts, older versions may not. Again, further detail below.

Re: (c): The USA Extended layout is built-in, so you can start using it Now; you just have to select it. But it may not be the most convenient layout for our purpose, so you may rather want to get a slightly more handy one. Yes, it too is explained below.

Forward On: The Modern Way of Unicode

With the new versions of Times and Helvetica that came in system 10.4, we thus got vowels with line above, dot below consonants for emphatics, carons (small "v's") above g, s and z; d and t with line below, etc. Helvetica also has "proper" ‘ayn and hamza as separate characters; Times does not, but many people use single quote marks ‘ and ’ for those anyway.

Most other fonts on the Mac do not have these characters, but Times and Helvetica are so widely used that this was a huge step forward. Previously you had to use the more stocky font called Lucida Grande for the purpose. This makes it possible for us to see these characters in documents or web pages. The next step is to find out the best way for you to use them yourself, to get into the documents you are writing.

A palette, or two ways to type diacritics
If you are not a regular user of transliteration, it is perhaps sufficient to use the tool called "Character Palette", which you can find in the "flag" menu. If you see no such, go to System Preferences, click International and then the "Input Menu" panel (sometimes more correctly called "Keyboards"). Select Character Palette, and you will see a small "flag" menu appear on the menu bar with the Palette as an item. The Palette displays all characters in all scripts in a huge list, so you locate and click on the special character you want to insert. Unfortunately, our diacritics are scattered over the huge list, so you would then want to set them up as "favourites".

The USA Extended keyboard
A bit more convenient is, however, to change the computer settings so that you can use the keyboard. This you can also find in System Preferences : International : Input Menu (Keyboards), scroll down the list until you find USA Extended. Check that item, and you will find it appears in the "flag" menu. While you are at it, also choose Keyboard Viewer from the "Input menu" list, this tool shows you which characters appear from which key in different fonts and keyboard layouts (press Shift and Option to display the effect these have).

USA Extended gives access to many kinds of diacritics and special characters: To type u with line above, you first type Option-a, and then u. Option-a is the general key for "line above next character". For dot below d, type Option-x and then d. Of course, your text must be in Times, Helvetica or other font that has these characters, the keyboard can only produce what the font actually contains. If you are typing in eg. "Times New Roman", the variant of Times that does not have diacritics, the program will most often switch to another font that has the character (e.g. Lucida Grande), or it may, in some cases, just display an empty box or an empty space.

The "Diacs" keyboard, especially for Arabists
But USA Extended does not give access to e.g. "true" ‘ayn and hamza, which many of us like to use. It also requires two keystrokes for every diacritic. People geared to Arabic transliteration may therefore want instead to use a keyboard for their particular purpose. This is provided here:

Download the Diacritic keyboard layout.

This keyboard layout is an alternative which focuses on our keys: You get "d with dot under" by typing Option-d (uppercase with Shift), long u by Option-u, etc. Hamza is Option-j, and ‘ayn Option-l. One keystroke for every character, which should provide for faster and more convenient typing. The package contains various national variants, if you are a US user, American Diacs is your choice, if you are UK British, French, Italian, German or Scandinavian, you will find a layout suited to your national keyboard. After installing it and choosing it in the "International" System Preference, you select it in the same way as mentioned above from the "flag" menu.

What? Is my Mac from April 2005 (or was it 2002 or 2003?) obsolete already?

Do not worry. If your Mac just missed out on May 2005, but is otherwise from within the last decade, all the above still applies, it is just that the only installed font that has our characters is Lucida Grande, maybe also Courier and Monaco. But these may not be the most beautiful fonts for printing. So, you would want to add some fonts for that purpose, fonts that e.g. look like Times, or other printable fonts, but have added our types of characters. Even those on the most recent machines may want to add some such fonts, to extend their repertoire of diacritics-enabled fonts.

Download the JaghbUni font and keyboard

-- In addition to the fonts, this package also contains the American Diacs diacritic keyboard mentioned above. If you are a European, you may want to add your national variety from the Keyboards package mentioned. The keyboard layouts will of course work with any Unicode font, not just the JaghbUni trio. --

At the bottom of this page is a list of fonts you can download from the Internet, of various shapes and usage, which contain the basic diacritics for our purposes.

Can I print in these fonts, send documents to my colleagues, or use in email?

Print, certainly. These are just regular fonts.

Send documents with these letters as attachments to colleagues; that depends on the colleague. The point is that these characters belong to particular fonts, as you understand from what we have said above. But when you send the document by email or otherwise to someone else, the font is not included, only the command "this document should be displayed in the Gentium font" (if that is the font you used). If the other guy has Gentium on his PC, fine, the PC will comply and display the text - and thus your diacritics - in his Gentium.
      But if he does not have this particular font on his machine, the PC will instead use another font, for example Times New Roman (Word's "default font"), and this font may not have the dots-under characters, e.g. if he is on a Windows XP computer. It has the vowels with line above, so these will display, but the others will appear to have disappeared. Now, if he has another Unicode font, such as Arial Unicode on his PC (and most PC users do, as mentioned), he can just choose Arial Unicode for the text in question, and presto! the diacritics will reappear, but of course in the Arial Unicode shape - Arial looks rather like Helvetica. To make it look just like it was on your Mac, he must install the same font on his machine.

For sending to another Mac user, the same is basically true, but the Mac will often (not always) help him part of the way. If it senses that some characters do not exist in the font of the document, it will automatically display those characters in Lucida Grande, the Mac's basic "all strange characters" font. They will stick out like a sore thumb, but he will see them. Some programs, however, will not allow this automatic replacement, and there the Mac like the PC requires the user to manually choose Lucida Grande or another Unicode font for the text.

As people upgrade from the still very common Windows XP to Vista or higher (and Macs to 10.5 or higher), these problems will be reduced, as newer computers tend to have better fonts for diacritics. But it will still be a few years before we can assume that anyone we write to has full fonts for transliteration.

Also, if the person you send to uses older software that does not support Unicode fonts, she may have some problems, she will not see the diacritics (see below). If that is the case, her best bet is to open the document you sent with another more modern program, such as TextEdit, a small text editor that comes with all Macs. It can open e.g. Microsoft Word documents, from the Mac or PC. In the long run, she should probably consider upgrading her software to something more recent - virtually all software today is Unicode-based - but for just occasionally reading your diacritics-laced documents, TextEdit will most often do.

In email, the same applies. Almost all current email software supports Unicode and should display your diacritics like any other text. But there may be people still who swear by older software that has served them well, but does not support Unicode, or may display the email in default fonts without diacritics. (Eudora is a case in point: excellent program still, but no Unicode and thus no diacritics). Mostly, however, Unicode-based diacritics should work today.

I want to make an index - how can I sort this text alphabetically?

That depends mostly on what software you use. Many program will sort the actual diacritic characters correctly: s/dot under is placed together with s, a/line over with a, etc. That is the case with Microsoft Office (Word/Excel), NisusWriter, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, Jedit X, BBEdit, FileMaker, EndNote, and the "list manager" iData (the other "list managers" iList and EagleData do not sort diacritics correctly). However, in all of them the separate letters ‘ayn and hamza are placed after z, not ignored in sorting as we want, thus ‘Ali will appear after Zubayr.
      The only program I see that correctly ignores 'ayn and hamza is the older version of Microsoft Office, 2004, there both Word and Excel will sort these correctly. Unfortunately, these versions do not run under OS 10.7 or higher, and the newer versions of Word have 'Ali after Zahra.

-.-.-

More about the Jaghbub / JaghbUni fonts

The Problem with the many Times

• TNR enclosed with Mac OS 10.5+ / Windows Vista, 7: full set of diacritics (vs. 5)
• Times enclosed with Mac OS 10.4+: all except ayn, hamza (vs. 5+)
• Times enclosed with Mac OS 10.3: long vowels, but not dots under sdthz
• TNR enclosed with Mac OS 10.4: the same, long vowels, not dots under (vs. 2.60).
• TNR installed by Microsoft Office 2004 / Windows XP: the same, long vowels, no dots (vs. 3.05).

Now, for the tricky part: You may have several versions of each font on your machine, some new and some old, and not know which you are actually using. The thing is: As you may know, on the Mac, fonts can be placed in several different folders on your machine. For example, there is a "Fonts" folder on your hard disk (Macintosh HD / Library / Fonts), and another "Fonts" folder inside your own user account (Macintosh HD / Joe / Library / Fonts), and the Mac can see and use both of these sets of fonts. But if a font with the same name exists in both folders, it is the User account folder (Joe / etc.) that takes priority, the other font becomes invisible to the system and is not used ("Times" and "Times New Roman" are two different names, so these are seen as separate fonts; both appear in your Fonts menu, but only one of each).

Thus, installing a new font may not mean that it replaces an older font. When the Mac system installs fonts in a system upgrade, it only changes the fonts in the first folder, the HD / Library / Fonts folder. But Microsoft installs its fonts in the User accounts folder. That is therefore the active version, if you have a "Times New Roman" font file in both folders. So, if you years ago installed Office 2004, and then later installed or upgraded your Mac to Leopard or Snow Leopard with a newer and better TNR font, it is still the older Microsoft version that is the active one; the newer font is ignored. That is generally not a good idea, because this Microsoft Office version not only lacks diacritics, it also may create problems for Safari and other applications when they try to display Arabic text. You should normally avoid the Microsoft 2004 version of Times New Roman even if the alternative is an older Apple version, and certainly if you have a newer one available. (Incidentally, from Lion onwards, the above mentioned "Library" folders have all been made invisible to the user. Not useful. To see them, either hold the Option key while selecting the Go menu in Finder - "Library" will then appear - or write "~/Library" (for your account's folder) or "/Library" (for the system-wide HD/Library folder) in the "Go To Folder" menu. See here for other ways to access it.)

So, it is useful to look inside these two Fonts folder and see if you can spot identically named fonts in both (or you can use the FontBook application, where duplicates are marked with a bullet or yellow triangle). If you find any, drag the older font out of its Fonts folder to make it inactive. While you are at it, do that for all such duplicates, it is generally sound advice only to have only one version of a font available; even though the system is able to juggle them, they sometimes cause problem. And in general, the newer (or larger, check the file size) version is normally the better.

The Traditional Way: Classic and contemporary, but private

That takes care of (a) and (c) above. Unfortunately, none of this is any good if the actual programs (applications) you want to use cannot make handle these new fonts - all of them are based on the Unicode system we mentioned, and you only have to go back to 2003 before Microsoft's programs on the Mac were unable to deal with these types of fonts.

So, if your favourite word processing software is Word for X, AppleWorks, or other that do not work with the Unicode system described above, your options are more limited. You can still write in diacritics - we have been doing so on the Mac since the 1980s - but not in these Unicode standard fonts.

You must instead type in older, non-standard fonts, what we now call a "legacy" (that is, old-style) font that contains the diacritics you want. There is no lack of such fonts; over the years many academics created all kinds of fonts with special characters for their own private or shared usage. The problem with these fonts is that they are private, they do not follow any agreement with other computers on how these characters are to be displayed. On your own machine, that does not matter, you can type, edit, print with these private fonts in any program, old or new. But if you want to share your documents with others, colleagues, or in particular: with your publisher, the diacritics will disappear or get "transformed" into something else. So that will demand some trickery on either side. However, before Unicode this was inevitable, so we had to learn to live with it.

I myself made one such "private" font, called Jaghbub, on which the newer "JaghbUni" font is based, of course. You are free to use Jaghbub, if you like. You cannot use the "American Diacs" keyboard with this font, because that is a Unicode keyboard, and Jaghbub is not a Unicode font. Instead, you use a parallel keyboard layout for the old-style font is called US Diacs. It is all in the package below (this also includes a Palatino and a Helvetica-based font).

Download Jaghbub for OS X

-.-.

What if I do not want to install anything? Though. There is no built-in way for the old software to display our diacritics. Lucida Grande does not work for diacritics, nor does USA Extended in these programs.

-.-.

And what about sharing my old documents, written in old-style transliteraion fonts? You can of course ask your correspondent to install the same private fonts as you used when you wrote the document. But often that is not feasible. And anyway, you may want to "update" your old documents yourself to the Unicode system, because the publisher asks you to; or because you want to continue working on them, e.g. to integrate them in recent work written in Unicode fonts.

The answer then is to "convert" the documents to the Unicode system - which means nothing more dramatic than to take the old "s with dot under" in your old font and replace with "s with dot under" in Unicode, and so on, as a series of "find and replace all"'s. The trick is just to figure out these characters; and of course it is tedious to do umpteen "finds" for each document.

For this reason, we have put here on this site some tools that automate the process. They are "macros" that convert from old-style to Unicode Arabic transliteration characters, from some 35 to 40 different old-style private transliteration fonts that I have found information about. The macros are for the programs NisusWriter Pro and Microsoft Word 2004. Check the separate page that lists the fonts included, with download and instruction information.
Tools for converting documents to Unicode transliteration

You can find another set of tools relating in transliteration and other issues here: Download JaghbAdd : A folder containing i.a. the Word 2004 Conversion macro, as well as some solutions for NisusExpress or other word processors.

Should I go "Modern" or "Traditional"?

If you have a choice, there is no question: Unicode fonts is what to use if you at all can. People who have been using legacy transliteration fonts and have emotional investment in them (like me!) will find both that co-operation with others is much simpler, and that the greater choice of fonts you now get opens up many new possibilities. So, maintain or upgrade your old documents, but make the change to Unicode for anything new you start, is my advice.

If you are new to transliteration, certainly the only reason to go with legacy fonts is if you for some reason must use software that does not support Unicode. There is not much that does not, but there are some cases:

If you work in the "Classic" environment (older Macs only), Unicode is not available, all Classic programs follow the "Traditional" route.

But some OS X applications also belong in this group, particularly older programs. From Microsoft that includes the version called "Word for X", which came in 2001. Eudora does not support Unicode. Filemaker added Unicode from version 7, as did Dreamweaver, also from vs. 7. A Unicode version of Quark XPress came in 2006 (also this version 7, as it happened). AppleWorks is not being updated, and does not support Unicode.

If your software version is from after ca. 2005, however, it is most likely to support Unicode. Only a few elderly holdouts such as MarinerWrite, Panorama, Mailsmith and a few others lack Unicode today. You can check the web page here on Arabic software, which lists what relevant software does and does not support Unicode (look under the "No"s for the no-shows.) Any program that supports Unicode and lets you choose a font, can use Unicode diacritics fonts, so even "No" programs for Arabic will do diacritics if it supports Unicode.

AND WHAT ABOUT A PC?

Since I do not use one, I can only present second-hand information. But all current Windows machines accept "modern" Unicode fonts. Windows XP or higher has Unicode built in, as had its predecessor Windows 2000. Only very old systems like Windows 95 / 98 / ME, which supported Unicode indirectly, will present any problems here.

Windows Vista and Windows 7 install a new version of Times New Roman that has a full range of Unicode diacritics. However, many are still using Windows XP, which uses an older and less complete version of this font; XP is the last Windows system that does not include a full Unicode font as standard. But those who have got a regular installation of Microsoft Office 2000 or higher, will most likely have at least one font that can display all the characters we need, Arial Unicode MS, one of the most complete Unicode fonts around. (Lucida Sans Unicode is another font that comes with some installations, but it does not contain all our characters, in particular not ‘ayn and hamza).
Under XP (and also later Windows versions) there are many fonts that have one group of diacritics - vowels with line above - but not the full range, in particular not characters for emphatics (dots under s, d, t, etc.). That was case with Times New Roman under XP, so for transliteration, one should seek the Vista version of that font. Vista and Win7 also include a few more diacritic fonts, but mostly "sans-serif" fairly similar to Arial. PC users, particularly those with Windows XP, will probably therefore want to install some extra nice-looking fonts that have a full range of our characters for transliteration. Gentium is a popular and free choice, but there are also several that mimick Times more so that you can use them as a substitute for Times New Roman, only with a full set of diacritics added; see below for a list. Those listed there should work in Windows XP and higher in programs that support Unicode.

Windows programs will sometimes not "substitute" missing characters from a default font, the PC user must manually choose a suitable font for display. So, a PC user who receives a document online will often have to remember to put the text in one of the fonts on his machine that has the required characters - Arial Unicode if nothing else - to see them, in particular the emphatics that the XP Times New Roman lacks. The characters are still "there", he just needs to apply a useful font to see them.

Then, how to get the diacritics into the document you are writing on a PC? In Word, you can create your own keyboard shortcuts for such special characters: Choose Insert : Symbol. Then select a Unicode font (one that contains the characters you want), and scroll until you find one of the relevant diacritic characters. With this selected, e.g. s with dot under, click on the button "Shortcut Key" and tell it "Alt + s". This should allow you in the future to type s/dot under by typing Alt and s together. You should then go through the relevant characters, and define shortcuts for each of them. Once you have done so, you should be able to type diacritics as easily on the PC as on a Mac.

If you use a Unicode font both on Windows and on the Mac, then you can easily transfer or send documents with transliterated text back and forth between them. Only remember that the computer may not remember the font choice, in particular if your correspondent on the "other side" does not use the same font as you. So, he may have to re-choose the correct font for the text, according to what he has available. As long as both are Unicode fonts, among those mentioned here, the diacritics will then appear correctly.

Can we use diacritics in Web pages?

Actually yes. There is no guarantee that everybody who reads the page will be able to see them, but it is more and more common e.g. from library sites to transliterate titles with Unicode characters. Most current web browsers can display these Unicode characters. On the Mac, all current web browsers will (Internet Explorer will not, but is now obsolete). On Windows, we can also probably assume that most current machines can display diacritics in Unicode.

However, if we want to create such a page, how do we do it? There are two ways. One, and the easiest, is to tell the browser that you are writing in Unicode by inserting a "charset" header. The web editing program you are using may do this for you, if not, go to the code and add this line in the header of your page:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">.

The other option, which was preferred earlier, is to convert all non-regular characters to special codes, "HTML entities". Then, the charset header is not required. Some web editors prefer this option, although it may be redundant today.

This must be done automatically, as these codes are unreadable to humans, "ṣ" looks like &#7779; (where 7779 is the decimal Unicode number of the character, or with the hex number, as &#x1e63;). Some web editors or word processors will convert this automatically when you save a page as html (Microsoft Word does it, e.g.), in others there is a command, in BBEdit, e.g., you can use the menu Markup : Utilities : Translate : Text to HTML. I have also made some tools in "Jaghbub Additions" for BBEdit ("text factories") that convert diacritics from "Jaghbub Classic", my older pre-Unicode font, to Unicode html entities.

If your web editor or CSS style does not you do it for you, the code is of the type
<font face="Jaghbuni, TimesTL, Gentium, Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Grande"> (diacritc text) </font> (put in the fonts that seem useful to you, the browser will pick the first font on the list that is available on the user's machine).
For relevant html editors, see the Arabic Programs page.

Unicode fonts for transliteration of Arabic

On the Mac, the number of useful fonts for our purpose also increases with every new system version. This is the list of fonts with transliteration characters that are installed on Macs from Systems 10.3 and up (fonts marked * do not have ‘ayn and hamza, but all have the "IJMES diacritics"; macrons over a, i, and u, and dots under s-d-t-h-z).

- In System 10.3 and higher:
• Courier (‘Ayn/hamza added only in system 10.5)
• Monaco (‘Ayn/hamza added in system 10.4)
• Lucida Grande covers all "Latin" ranges, from system 10.0 and up.
  - In System 10.4, these were added to the list:
• Times * [in 10.3 long vowels only].
• Helvetica: [in 10.3, long vowels only].
  - From system 10.5, we get all the above and also:
• Arial Unicode MS
• Microsoft Sans Serif
• Tahoma
• American Typewriter * (diacritics from 10.5)
• Courier New (diacritics from 10.5)
• Times New Roman (full diacritics from 10.5, earlier only long vowels)

• A number of third-party fonts that contain the "IJMES" diacritics also come "bundled" with various software, such as e.g.: Academy Engraved, Bank Gothic, Blair, Bordeaux, Bradley Hand, Cracked, Dakota, Jazz, Party, SantaFe, Savoye, Stone Sans. A couple (Mona Lisa, Bodoni, Palatino) also have ‘ayn and hamza. Check, you may already have them installed. A few fonts for Asian languages (Sathu, Silom, Thonburi and others) also have our characters.

(Times-like:)
• LeedsUni
• FreeSerif (1)
• TimesTL (I, B, BI) (2)
• Titus Cyberbit
• Doulos SIL
• JaghbUni (I, B, BI)

(Other serif fonts:)
• Thryomanes (I, B, BI)
• Charis SIL (I, B, BI)
• Gentium (I)
• Junicode (I, B, BI)
• Chrysanthi Unicode
• Dialekt Uni (I, B)
• DejaVu Serif (I, B, BI, C, CI, CB, CBI)
• Hindsight Unicode
• Code 2000
• Cardo (2)
• Caslon Unicode (3)
• jGaramond (4)
• KoufrUni (I, B, BI)

(Sans-serif fonts:)
• DejaVu Sans (I, B, BI, C, CI, CB, CBI)
• BairUni (B)
  (Lucida Grande and Arial Unicode are sans-serif fonts)

(Mono-spaced fonts:)
• SImPL
• Everson Mono
• DejaVu Sans Mono (I, B, BI)
• FreeMono (1)
• GNU Unifont

In addition may be mentioned two packages and a font which have the required diacritics, except for ‘ayn and hamza:
• ZU fonts. Fifteen different fonts, serif (Baskerville, Garamond etc.), sans-serif, and headline fonts.
• The ae_fonts is a package of useful Arabic fonts. They also have a full European character set, including basic transliteration.
• The same is true for the font Naqsh which also has a full Unicode set of 'ajami characters.

(1) Roman only, italics lack ‘ayn and hamza. This is a font from the GNU Freefont package. (The third font in the package, FreeSans does not have our characters.)
(2) Lacks h/curve under, d-t line under.
(3) Roman is complete, italics lack ‘ayn and hamza.
(4) Roman only, bold and italics lack our diacritics.

Check each page for conditions of use. These are all free (or inexpensive shareware) at least in trial versions that appear to be fully functional.

Knut S. Vikør