Arabic Keyboard Settings

It is most common whenever anyone sees stickers of Arabic letters on my keyboard, they become fascinated and start to ask the most common question: “Apa tu, boleh tulis Arab eh? Camne nak install ek?”

As a matter of fact, there is no extra installation that you need to do. Most Windows OS already have the language pack inside (ie the right-to-left languages), it’s a matter of installing the package or not. Hiope the following instructions will be of use to you. Any questions can forward to my email jabalnurr(AT)gmail(DOT)com.
Cheers.

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NOTE: The following instruction is for Windows Vista. For Windows XP, the setting is is almost the same, except for a few minor terms which will be stated in the instructions accordingly.

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(1) Go to START menu è (2) Control Panel è (3) Regional and Language Options

(4) Click “Keyboards and Languages” tabè (5) Click “Change keyboards…” button

Next, in the “Text Services and Input Languages”, (6) Click “Add…”

Next, in the “Add Input Language” box, (7) choose any Arabic keyboard layout from the dropdowns. It doesn’t matter which layout you choose, as long as it’s “Arabic 101”. (8) Tick the box next to it. In this case, I chose Arabic (Saudi Arabia). Depends on your fancies. (9) Click OK.

Now, (10) Click the “Advance Key Settings” tab. By default, the following setting has actually been set. Nevertheless, we will make sure it’s the correct setting we want.

(11) Click the “Change Key Sequence…” button.

(12) The setting should be as follows:

• 1. Switch Input Language: Left Alt + Shift
  2. Switch Keyboard Layout: Ctrl + Shift
  3. OR, you can choose any setting you like given by the options.

(13) Click OK, OK and OK.

Now you’re done with the settings. Lets try it out!

Testing the Arabic keyboard settings:

1) Open MS Word. The above figure is the usual left-to-right cursor.

2) When you press Alt+Shift, you are changing the language from English to Arabic, and vice versa. Now you can type in Arabic (as shown above). However, the layout is still from left-to-right.

NOTE: In order to change from English to Arabic (or vice versa), it doesn’t actually matter which side of the Alt+Shift you use, whether left or right. However, this is not the case for changing the layout; as we will see next.

3) To change keyboard layout from English to Arabic, press RIGHT Ctrl+Shift. To change back to English, press LEFT Ctrl+Shift.

VOILA!!

However, physically, your keyboard does not show the Arabic characters. You can buy the sticker for RM5 to paste onto your keyboard. Need I mention that the Arabic keyboard sticker is very minimal. There a few characters not shown on the sticker such as the fathah (baris atas), kasrah (baris bawah) and dhammah (baris depan) signs. You can try it out for yourself to find out the other characters. Good luck!