Re: European Arabic xkb Keyboard Layout

[Youssef Chahibi <chahibi at gmail dot com>]

في خميس 06 أبريل 2006 15:36, كتب Ali El Dada:
> Hi,
>
> If you switch between languages when typing, or if you find trouble
> typing Arabic because of the ridiculously-difficult layouts of Arabic
> keyboards, this might be of help to you:
>
> http://www.mdstud.chalmers.se/~eldada/keyboard.html
>
> Comments are welcome.
>
> Ali El Dada
	السلام عليكم
	In the last summer, I had to use my sister's laptop to translate some files. 
But this laptop doesn't have arabic keys and has an AZERTY keyboard, so I 
created a new keymap based on the latin keys z for ز r for ر .... and A 
for َ , I for ِ ِ ... It was quite helpful.  But this is not a  definitive a 
solution. The keymap used in modern computers is the nearly the same used in 
the old typing machines 
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Machine_a_ecrire_arabe.png 
afaik. Therefore, many people are used to this classical keymap which is in 
my opinion not riduculous at all: The most used characters ش س ي ب ل ا ت ن م 
ك ط are in the middle line and in the center, the least used are in the 
corners , unlike the qwerty keymap which places the key in a random way, to 
make the most used keys as far as possible for the safety of the machine. For 
the fast typers your keymap is not a solution, but it may be for rare arabic 
typers or laptop owners who won't like to put stickers or to copy on your 
pendrive for special occasions when there are no arabic keyboards. Moreover, 
having to hold the AltGr key to type in arabic is a bit difficult, shortcut 
keys (Ctrl + Space is my favourite) are much more helpful and easier to set .