Richard Suchenwirth -- Arblish is part of The Lish family of transliterators, with full source at A simple Arabic renderer. Here's how the input, plain 7-bit ASCII, looks like for a list of country names:
Algeria [ar AljzA}_r] Australia [ar >strAlyA] Austria [ar AlnmsA] Brazil [ar AlbrAzyl] China [ar AlSyn] Egypt [ar mSr] France [ar frnsA] Germany [ar AlmAnyA] Great Britain [ar bryTAnyA AlEZmY] India [ar Alhnd] Irak [ar AlErAq] Israel [ar <srA}yl] Italy [ar <yTAlyA] Jordan [ar Al>rdn] Kuwait [ar Alkwyt] Lebanon [ar lbnAn] Libya [ar lybyA] Morocco [ar Almgrb] Saudi Arabia [ar Almmlkp AlErbyp AlsEwdyp] Sudan [ar AlswdAn] Syria [ar swryA] Tunisia [ar twns] UAE [ar AlAmArAt AlErbyp AlmtHdp] USA [ar AlwlAyAt AlmtHdp AlAmrykyp] Yemen [ar Aljmhwryp AlErbyp Alymnyp]
If you apply subst to this text (and have the Arblish procedures in reach, and have Unicode-enabled display and a font that offers Arabic glyphs), you see the real picture. Enjoy!
This is precisely in Buckwalter transliteration, including some of the non-letter characters he uses. Curly braces (as in Israel) are caught in the renderer. But still, I'd prefer to use letters for letters. In the core alphabet, the renderer already allows c for /shin/ (think of French Chine ;-) and V for /dhal/. I'd also consider it intuitive to use "I" (capital) for Alef-with-Hamzah-below, which is now "<", and maybe "U" for waw-hamzah. Stepping further into digraphs, "'Y" would pretty nicely describe "hamzah-on-ya" (' is for stand-alone Hamzah, Y is for dotless ya, a.k.a. alef maqsurah), even if this is one single character U+0626 in Unicode. "Israel" would then look like "Isra'Yyl".Same for Hamzah-on-Alef U+0623, now ">", could be "'A", making Jordan look like "Al'Ardn". Opinions?
Offering alternatives to "<" and ">" becomes crucial if we want to generate HTML documents with Arblish - more on that soon here (for starters, look at the proc u2html in Encoding translations and i18n ) -- RS