Arabic Keyboard Problem

[Hesham Hassan <hesham at bestweb dot net>]

Hi,
  I noticed that the Arabic keyboard layout was changed a few days ago, so 
this message is dedicated to Mr. Mohammed Yousif who I believe made that 
change.  I propose that the change made is contrary to what most Arabic 
Windows users would expect.  The backslash is the traditional place for the 
thal and shadda as far as I know.  So, if you were to take my suggestion, we 
would change the line that reads:

key <BKSL> { [  ], [     backslash,      bar               ]       };

back to:

key <BKSL> { [  ], [     Arabic_thal,      Arabic_shadda   ]       };


And replace the line that reads:

key <TLDE> { [  ], [     Arabic_thal,      Arabic_shadda   ]       };

with something else... in my version of this file (from Linux Mandrake) I have 
it replaced with the following:

key <TLDE> { [  ], [     less,		greater ]	};

This is just a suggestion.  The benefits of course are that we get the "less 
than" and "greater than" symbols, and since we already have a "backslash" 
somewhere else the original change that was made would be redundant, and the 
"bar" character is not that useful in Arabic anyways, in fact, I only see it 
when I program (and there aren't many, if any, Arabic programming languages 
that I have heard of).


Now of course, if you really wanted to add some extra characters or fix up bad 
ones, below are a bunch of broken keys...  at least I believe that they are 
broken since I use this keyboard layout with KDE everyday and none of these 
keys seem to have any effect.  The broken parts are those in hex and the 
letter 'S' which isn't really broken but rather unusual in an Arabic 
keyboard:


key <AD05> { [  ], [      Arabic_feh,       0x100fef9      ]       };
key <AC05> { [  ], [      Arabic_lam,       0x100fef7      ]       };
key <AC02> { [  ], [     Arabic_seen,               S      ]       };
key <AB05> { [  ], [       0x100fefb,      0x100fef5       ]       };

These are the number keys.  They are supposed to display the numbers in Arabic 
but don't.

key <AE01> { [  ], [       0x1000661,          exclam      ]       };
key <AE02> { [  ], [       0x1000662,              at      ]       };
key <AE03> { [  ], [       0x1000663,      numbersign      ]       };
key <AE04> { [  ], [       0x1000664,          dollar      ]       };
key <AE05> { [  ], [       0x1000665,         percent      ]       };
key <AE06> { [  ], [       0x1000666,     asciicircum      ]       };
key <AE07> { [  ], [       0x1000667,       ampersand      ]       };
key <AE08> { [  ], [       0x1000668,        asterisk      ]       };
key <AE09> { [  ], [       0x1000669,       parenleft      ]       };
key <AE10> { [  ], [       0x1000660,      parenright      ]       };

If you would like some sample standard and not so standard Arabic keyboard 
layouts to look at, the following url contains some nice images: 
http://crl.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/keyboards/arabic.html


Salamat,
Hesham Hassan