Perso-Arabic in Latin transliteration

  This section is for font-makers who need to know which Latin characters are needed for scholarly transliteration, transcription or romanization of characters in the Perso-Arabic script.

Below you'll find links to charts in both .doc and .html format of Latin characters needed for transliterating  Persian according to the Library of Congress system. In addition, the variants used to transliterate Arabic are also provided for those few letters where a different character is used than Persian.

What you will NOT find on this page is info pertaining to the Perso-Arabic script. This is only about Latin script.
To see all the characters, you may need a modern computer and/or the Gentium font.

Charts

Chart of characters:  .doc  and .html

Refer to the Persian PDF chart by the Library of Congress

Refer to the Arabic PDF chart by the Library of Congress

If you want to actually type the characters in the above chart (as opposed to admiring them only!) you will either have to use the hunt and peck method and/or assign them to new keys or else get serious and install a modified English keyboard. See below for a keyboard already made for this purpose.

 
Here is a keyboard to type all the letters in the above chart. This keyboard works only on Win2000, WinXP and Vista. Unzip the .zip file after downloading to your desktop. You will see two folders. Find the file called setup.exe and just click on it to install. (Don't rearrange any files or take them out of their folders once on your desktop!) After that, you need to enable your keyboard. So, go Start > Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Languages > Details. You will see that under your English keyboard(s) is a new one called "perlat". Highlight or Select "perlat" and hit Apply and Ok and you're done. If this is confusing, see some illustrated directions which were originally made for a similar keyboard.

Please note that this keyboard is, truth be told, a quick hack so only use it when you have need for these special transliteration characters and revert back to your normal English keyboard for everyday use. Hopefully one day we can make a better one.

Still to come:

The symbols needed for scansion of Perso-Arabic poetry....

 

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