March 10, 2007
An improved phonetic Arabic Keyboard Layout.
When I started learning Arabic, I remember being annoyed that there weren't enough resources in English for students looking to add an Arabic keyboard layout to Windows, so they could type fun things like مرØباً or آكل Ù?لاÙ?Ù„ كليوم، Ùˆ انت؟ The available keyboard on Windows, the standard 101/102 key layouts, were totally unintuitive to a pair of hands used to the traditional English keyboard, though arguably they are very efficient for a native Arabic user.
After some hunting, I found Gyula Zsgri's website that had a phonetic Arabic keyboard layout installable for Windows. However, on installing it the keyboard refused to load on my machine, and the little language bar on the bottom never opened up. I spent hours trying to get it to work, but just couldn't.
Over the last week, while preparing for my final exam next week, I found that Microsoft had a neat little keyboard making tool, and so I used Gyula's layout with some improvements I added on to make a Phonetic Arabic keyboard installer that runs on Windows XP/Vista/2000 (Not sure about Windows 98).
As with Gyula's layout, I've kept the Persian/Urdu extensions as well, as I find them useful when making notes to myself when transliterating from English to Arabic. According to Ziad at the LSE, in places like Iraq it is quite normal to use Persian characters like Che, Pe, Ge and Ve to express foreign loan words.
Just download the file, unzip it, and install it. It should automatically add the keyboard as an alternative, and should appear in the language bar in the bottom. I'll try and post more detailed instructions soon.
Click here to download the file.
Keyboard Layout Images:
Basic:
With the Shift Button Pressed:
With the Alt-Gr (Right hand side Alt-Key) Button Pressed:
Posted by
vinayak on Mar 10, '07 at 6:13 PM | Permalink
Comments
This is a test to see whether comments work on the new server.
Posted by: Vinayak at March 13, 2007 11:26 PM
Sorry to be back, but I can't seem to find the double dhammah. The Alt-Gr + W gives this weird character doesn't look like the double dhammah. Is that the one that's supposed to be it, or am I being a blind idiot? Thanks, Vins.
Posted by: Em at March 11, 2007 2:14 AM
Wow, this is fantastic! It's pretty addictive, and increases typing speed by a good 100% at least.
!شكرا، يا اخيه
Posted by: Em at March 11, 2007 1:43 AM
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