To swap between Roman and Arabic mode in this text box, hit ctl-' (that's control and apostrophe). The box will shade blue when it's in Arabic mode. From there, type Roman letters that look like the Arabic ones you want. Play around with it and you'll probably figure it out.
Some tips:
- Use capitals for pharyngealized ("heavy", "hard") consonants like ص.
- Use apostrophe for ع.
- Use @ for ة (teh marbuta).
- After typing a some keys, like k (which produces a ك), if you want a space afterwards you must press space twice. This is so letter pairs, like "kh", can still produce a different letter (in this case خ). Try typing this sequence of keys, including the spaces, slowly to see the difference: "kb kh k h". The letter pairs that exhibit this behavior are: th kh dh sh gh.
Bookmarklet
This is also available as a bookmarklet. Drag this to your bookmarks toolbar:
Then clicking on this bookmarklet on any site ought to allow the ctl-' shortcut to work on any text area.
Urdu
See also: Faried Nawaz's Urdu version.
Feedback
This mapping is based only on my intuition. Please send me comments and suggestions.
Evan Martin, martine@danga.com