Is there an Anglicized transliteration IME for typing Arabic?

In IBus Preferences, Hindi has 5 different IMEs (Input Method Editors), some of which utilize Anglicized transliteration schemes.. ie. they use the Latin alphabet keys on a US keyboard to represent semi-equivalent sounds between the two languages... Chinese has an Anglicized transliteration system called 'pinyin' which is available in IBus...

There is only one Arabic IME which shows up in IBus (I'm using Lucid 10.04).. This Arabic IME uses a native Arabic keyboard layout, which throws me into a spin, as I'm not in any way familiar with the layout, nor the script(yet)... Is there any such thing as an Anglicized IME for Arabic, in any form?.. eg. A later version of Ubuntu, or in Emacs, etc, or some other specifically-for-Arabic program?


Solution 1:

The Buckwalter Arabic transliteration is available in 11.04 at least for Egypt and Syrian Arab Republic keyboard layouts, so go to Keyboard Preferences > Layouts > Add... and then pick Country: Egypt and Variants: Arabic Buckwalter, and give it a try. I don't know if there are regional differences between the same variant in different countries.