to get used to, for example the nunated appear as N, F, K, and the ("no vowel") as o. is p. The difficulty probably has happened because usually the Buckwalter transliteration is used and/or presented without the rationale behind the letters. Though those particular letters seem to be random they are actually mnemonically linked to the original letter. Furthermore, since the original Buckwalter scheme was developed, several other variants have emerged, although they are not all standardized. Buckwalter transliteration is not compatible with XML, so "XML safe" versions often modify the following characters: < > & (أ إ and ؤ respectively; Buckwalter suggests transliterating them as I O W, respectively). Completely "safe" transliteration schemes replace all non-alphanumeric characters (such as $';*) with alphanumeric characters. When transliterating Arabic text, several other issues may arise. First, some Arabic characters are not specified in the transliteration table, including non-alphabetic characters such as ۞ and ۝, punctuation such as ؛ ؟, and Eastern Arabic numerals. Similarly, sometimes Arabic sentences will borrow non-Arabic letters from Persian, some of which are defined in the full Buckwalter table. Symbols that are not defined in the transliteration table may be deleted, kept as non-Latin symbols embedded in transliterated text, or transliterated into different (non-conflicting) Latin symbols. (For instance, it is straightforward to convert from Hindi numerals to Arabic numerals.) Another issue that arises is how to handle transliterating Arabic text with embedded ASCII text; for instance, an Arabic sentence that refers to "IBM" or an Arabic sentence that includes a quote in English. If the Latin text is not explicitly marked, it is a challenge to distinguish transliterated Arabic from Latin. If transliterated text with embedded Latin is later transliterated back to Arabic, the Latin text will be transliterated into garbage Arabic. Finally, another important decision to make is how much normalization of the Arabic text should be done during transliteration. This may include removing kashida, removing short vowels and/or other diacritics, and/or normalizing spelling. On the other hand, all typical markings one would expect to use when writing - !@#%?.,;:()[]+= were not used because they are also used in Arabic text. Thus, if the English IBM did appear in English, in the Arabic text it was in the original concept supposed be marked by putting double quotes around it: ""IBM"". This mechanism allows for automatic language processing to take place leaving non-Arabic text as is, unprocessed when