[XeTeX] Arabic Transliteration

[Benct Philip Jonsson]

With XeTeX you don't need to use the TeX macros for
combining diacritics, so why not just use the Unicode
characters U+0351 for ayn and U+0357 for hamza if you
want combining diacritics, or U+02BE (hamza) and U+02BF
(ayn) if you want spacing characters.  To deem from
what I have peripherally come across in the course of
working on Indo-European and Indo-Iranian comparative
philology spacing characters are the most usual,
so you'ld write ʾalif  and ʿayn rather than a͗lif and a͑yn,
although I can certainly see why you would want to use
combining diacritics: hamza is a combining diacritic
in the original script, and the transliteration symbols
are derived from the Greek breathings which are
normally combining on lowercase letters.

/BP

P.S. If you are on Windows I heartily recommend
BabelMap and BabelPad which can be found at
<http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/>.
BabelMap is a utility for finding and copying
Unicode characters.  BabelPad is a text editor
which has BabelMap integrated.  I even run
BabelPad in emulation mode on Ubuntu with some
success, preferring it to Ubuntu's built-in
character map.

Mohammad Gharaibeh skrev:
> Hello all,
> 
> I'll create a halfring (left and right) to transliterate a 
> arabic hamza and ain. I found it much more confortable, as 
> creating an arabxetex environment with the transliteration 
> option, because I will transliterate only a few words like 
> names.
> I just found the other diacritics like \={a} or \d{t} for 
> example, but the ain and the hamza I coudln't find.
> 
> who can help me?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Mohammad
> 
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