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Microsoft's Arabic keyboard layouts are perfect for Arabic physical keyboards but what if you have a Western keyboard? You can download keyboard layouts from this site, designed for the U. S. keyboard.
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The package for Windows 2000, XP and NT 4.0 contains two keyboard layouts: Arabic ASDF Eastern with Arabic-Indic digists and Arabic ASDF Western with Arabic-European digits. The package for Windows 95, 98 and ME has only one keyboard layout: Arabic ASDF, which is like Arabic ASDF Western but without Farsi yeh.
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Switch languages with the keyboard layout indicator on the Windows taskbar:
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Type Arabic by sound or shape:
Some mappings are arbitrary but not completely:
is placed next
to 
because they look
and sound similarly.
and v
are dental sounds:
is interdental and v is labiodental.
Alif maksura is mapped onto Shift+Y and Farsi yeh is mapped onto Shift+F.
Hold down the AltGr key (= the right Alt key) to type diacritics and tatweel:
| AltGr+A | > | fatha |
| AltGr+I | > | kasra |
| AltGr+U | > | damma |
| AltGr+Q | > | fathatan |
| AltGr+E | > | kasratan |
| AltGr+W | > | dammatan |
| AltGr+O | > | sukun |
| AltGr+S | > | shadda |
| AltGr+T | > | tatweel |
Hold down the Shift key to type quotation marks, dashes or decimal comma:
| Shift+Q | > | left single quote |
| Shift+W | > | right single quote |
| Shift+E | > | left double quote |
| Shift+R | > | right double quote |
| Shift+N | > | en dash |
| Shift+M | > | em dash |
| Shift+6 | > | decimal comma |
Hold down the AltGr key (= the right Alt key) to type remapped punctuation:
| AltGr+, | > | English comma |
| AltGr+; | > | English semicolon |
| AltGr+/ | > | English question mark |
| AltGr+\ | > | backslash |
Type | with Shift+AltGr+\.
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Windows 2000 and XP support right-to-left languages at the system level.
Users of Windows 95, 98 or ME can type right-to-left in bidirectional applications such as
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I believe this package to be safe but it is entirely your risk to download and use it. You can freely use and distribute it but you are not allowed to restrict the rights of others to freely use and distribute it.
Use a decompression utility to extract the installation package from the zip file. Read the readme file and run fbarab.exe.
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I used the following applications to make the keyboard layouts, the help files, and the installer:
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| © 2000-2002 Gyula Zsigri | [Home] | Last updated: August 9, 2002 |