Google never ceases to amaze us. Google Indic Transliteration tool as shown in the above screen grab lets you type in roman, a.k.a. English characters and as you finish a word a press the space bar, the tool immediately converts it into Urdu. If the word you see is not exactly what you wanted, click on the word and a drop down will show you other related possibilities.
The speed and performance is simply amazing. It also allows you to type in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.
I find the eiktub transliteration tool (http://www.eiktub.com/) to be very intuitive. One gets used to it rather quickly.
-FTY
But, Faizan, it is not for Urdu. Is it? For instance, I could not find “Rday”. I could not write the Urdu of horse. Or did I miss something obvious?
It doesn’t express capabilities for the Sanskrit-based letters yet, which is agreeably unfortunate. Were it to do so, I believe its flexibility in being able to transliterate any combination of Urdu letters, without having to resort to an intermediary computer to decide what’s best, would render it powerful. Perhaps if a similar tool were to be developed by the more tech-savvy among us…