Transliteration editors for Arabic, Persian and Urdu

Transliteration editors are essential for keying-in language scripts into the computer using QWERTY keyboard. Applications of transliteration editors in the context of Universal Digital Library (UDL) include entry of meta-data and dictionaries for many languages both local and International. In this paper we propose a simple approach for building transliteration editors for International languages such as Arabic, Persian and Urdu using Unicode and by taking advantage of its rendering engine which is called Unicode rendering engine. We demonstrate the usefulness of the Unicode based approach to build transliteration editors for International Languages, and report its advantages needing little maintenance and few entries in the mapping table, and ease of adding new features such as adding letters, to the transliteration scheme. We also explain how easy it is to add any language and build a transliteration editor using Unicode and its mapping tables. We demonstrate the transliteration editor for 3 International languages and also explain how this approach can be adapted for any foreign language.