eFarsi: Writing Persian With Latin Letters

When my daughter was a few years old, I started collecting some Persian children's songs for her. I also started translating some stories for her. For some reason, I insisted to write everything on the computer. Probably because I wanted to publish the stuff in order to share it with others.

In those days, it wasn't easy to write Persian on your personal computer. I started using a system called ArabTeX for a while and during a visit to USA I bought a system called Nisus Writer that gave me the possibility to write Persian. But I never felt comfortable using these systems. Nowadays, it is rather easy to write Persian on the computer and I have seen some beautifully formatted newspapers, books and blogs typeset on the computer. Despite all the recent developments, I still find writing Persian on the computer a bit too difficult. I don't know how many of you regularly receive emails written in the Persian-Arabic script, but although some of the persons I communicate with do have Persian-Arabic fonts on their computers, I have never received such an email. Something is not right. To start with the keyboard I am using now does not have the Persian-Arabic letters. Furthermore, I have not seen any cheap (or free) software that is user friendly. The situation is much worse for Persian speakers born and educated outside Iran. Even if there were good software for writing Persian, most of the young Iranians outside Iran will not be able to use it effectively. The threshold of learning to write in the traditional Persian-Arabic script is too high.

During the late 80's I gave up on writing Persian on the computer and started thinking about writing Persian using the Latin alphabet. This was mainly for my kids. We did our best to teach them writing Persian but they didn't have the time or the motivation to train enough. I decided to create an alphabet that was close to what they already learn in school and also a writing system that makes it possible to write Persian. Another reason was that I realized that we write Persian using the latin alphabet quite often so we might as well create some conventions that facilitate this.

Anyway, saretuno dard nayâram, the following paper is about writing Persian using the latin alphabet and I hope those Persian speakers, who have difficulty writing in the traditional way, find it useful for publishing their words. The paper is located at the following address:

http://www.ida.liu.se/~jalma/efarsi.pdf

Unfortunately, the paper is not in tutorial form but I will provide a shorter version of it as a tutorial sometime in future.

Update: Some articles related to this writing system are on http://www.dabire.com.