Re: Arabic Keyboard layout

[Oibane <pflm52td at w6 dot dion dot ne dot jp>]

Hi, Khaled.

1. On the difference from the usual Arabic keyboard.
a) dhal/shadda comes left to the 1 / ! key, as already Amr Gharbeia 
   has pointed out. (You say it's weird, but it's a letter key.
   In Japan, it's Esc, though.)
b) there is less / greater < > key, (greater is shifted) right to the
   tah / double quote.
c) There's no "bar" | key. It is found left to the z / hamza-on-yeh /
   tilde, right to the left-shift. Your keyboard doesn't have it,
   so a compromise is necessary, perhaps putting it right to the
   tah / double quote.

(I have never seen a real Arabic keyboard. I'm Japanese. Please
someone, correct me if necessary.)

2. On various keyboards around the world.
Forget about it. There're many many many keyboards. You can never satisfy
all. Just following the local custom is the easiest, and it's the
best, I think. If some way to customize thekeyboard layout is
provided, then it'll be great; it helps the situation, but again, you
can omit it, if you can't afford it. 

# As you may know already, symbols are aligned in various ways, even
# if the letters are qwerty. I'm Japanese, and ours is totally
# different from the Arabic layout.

3. On the inefficiency.
In my opinion, it is recommendable to make the deviation from the 
custom as slight as possible, even if it is bad. From my experience,
people really dislike the layouts they are unfamiliar with.
 I customize my keyboard as I like, but it would be a tough task to
meddle with unfamiliar layout; changes are based upon the common.

Good night,
"Oibane"