Temporary Download Package (7 May 2001)

In particular, links about downloading two fonts and two keyboards from this site are not functional. All this freebie material is temporarily available in one single zipped file

MASSARAB.ZIP (50K) .

Please ignore all the links below that offer to download fonts and/or keyboards individually.

The following link to an unfinished abstract discussion of

Unicode and Arabic-Script Unicode

is also located here on a temporary basis only.

If we tell you that the book is /!lj!m& l!'Hk!m !lqr!@n/ of the Imám al-Qurtubíy, you can make it out even from that degraded screen shot. (It's quite clear if you zoom the above picture to 200%, and you can see that we guessed wrong what the number 58 means.) Of course at this point you would clearly want a utility to chop HTML mark-ups out of documents and leave only the text. We have prepared one that specializes in Arabic text. No doubt there are more reliable ones available than that hasty concoction. We will discuss that nerdish sort of thing separately.

If you only want to copy-and-paste some scrap of Arabic that doesn't cross any format boundaries, this procedure would be tolerable even without automated assistance. It is not always available, however. Websites can prevent "View\Source" from working, quite apart from encryption properly so called. Furthermore the text may not even be in the so-called "source," when you do view it. This is the case at al-Warráq, although it doesn't matter there because they let you e-mail pages out. Even with Expensive Arabic Windows, you will run into websites that don't let you copy text at all.

Another struggle with the brute suggests that we ought to say more about Mirosoft Word for Windows (WinWord 9) and not just blithely abandon you to its help files. It is a terrifically "powerful" program, and you can do quite remarkable things with it, as for instance put up a Library of Congress virtual catalog card exactly the way it looks at

{{ http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=bbSearch }}

and then talk about the transliterated Arabic there in terms of the "real thing." But the price of this power is complication. WinWord 9 can almost certainly do anything one might ever want to do with Arabic, not to mention lesser languages, but that doesn't mean that one will figure out how to do it in this lifetime. For instance, try to select one word of that virtual library card. Since the whole fetch of text it was in (the author entry for a book) was a hyperlink, there seemed no way to touch it with the mouse and not activate the link rather than select part of the text. Since it was only one word, we wound up typing it in from scratch, even though it involved two of those exotic overscore characters they do Arabic with in Washington.

Now we remembered reading about exactly this hyperlink problem in the annoyances book mentioned above, but unfortunately we didn't remember what the solution is, because it was a library copy of the book and we didn't have it at the computer. The moral of the story is that we should advise you not only to read but to own a good book on WinWord 9. Before trying anything the least bit complicated in Arabic, make sure you understand what the program does with text in English, above all how paragraph formatting is stored in the paragraph marker at the end of the paragraph and what that implies and why Woody Leonard in op. cit. takes the line that you can't be serious about WinWord if you don't have the tabs and paragraph markers showing all the time. You don't have to actually do that. It can look very distracting. But you should certainly understand why he recommends it and turn the hidden characters on frequently to make sure you understand what is happening.

Specifically about Arabic, you should (but won't) keep a whole bunch of things in mind whenever you stick the cursor ("caret") somewhere and either start typing or start selecting text.

(a) The Keyboard. This is, as we have noticed, outside of WinWord altogether, and therefore a fortiori outside paragraph four of your document. If you were typing Arabic and jumped the cursor to a patch of English, nobody tells the keyboard software that this happened. It may seem obvious to a human being that if you plunge into the middle of an Arabic word you will almost certainly not want to type English. But machines and software can be very dumb about certain things, and this is one of them.

(b) Direction of Entry. You must clearly understand that right-to-left data entry is NOT the same thing as Arabic, nor left-to-right the same thing as English. This distinction becomes particularly important inside dialog boxes. The fact that the flashing gizmo is located at the east end of the little box does not necessarily mean that Arabic is going to happen when you hit a key. You are quite as likely to get English shoved in backwards instead.

For use inside dialog boxes especially (where you usually cannot get at a program's menu or icons), there are five (5) special keyboard shortcuts that you must simply memorize:

{Alt}{LeftShift}   gives left-to-right entry.
{Alt}{RightShift}  gives right-to-left entry.
{Ctrl}{LeftShift}  should enforce English.
{Ctrl}{RightShift} should enforce Arabic.
{Ctrl}{V}          pastes text from the clipboard.

The last item has nothing specifically to do with Arabic, but learning it can save you an immense number of keystrokes. It also helps to cope with the gibberish-that-should-be-Arabic problem, which is never going to go away altogether. The "should enforce English" is weasel-worded, because what these keys do is cycle through the whole list of keyboards. If there are only English and Arabic, they will work as described, but after you add Greek and Russian things begin to get a little tricky and you'll probably have to remember to set the language right before getting into a dialog box at all.

(c) Alignment of Paragraphs. This is again a completely separate question from either Arabic/English or R2L/L2R. Unlike them, it affects how the document looks after it is entered, not what happens when you strike a key.

(d) Fonts. Unlike all the above, the font for the next character entered is picked up from context when you jump from place to place in your document. You cannot, however, tell anything about what language you are in by looking at the name of the current font in the WinWord toolbar. The standard Microsoft fonts ("Arial", "Courier New", "Tahoma", and "Times New Roman") are understood by WinWord 9 to be the names of Arabic typefaces as well as Latin ones.

(e) Language. WinWord's idea of what language a block of text is in is only remotely related to yours or mine. It primarily answers the question about what spell-checker to use. However, since the computer coding of Windows Arabic and ordinary English ASCII scarcely overlap at all, the program can usually tell the difference. For instance, if you open a plain text Arabic document like those available at

{{ http://www.muhaddith.com/cgi-bin/a_Optns.exe }}

in WinWord 9, the prgram will correctly decide that the document is in "Arabic (Windows)" even though it does ask you to confirm this analysis. With short bits of text, however, especially those brought in by pasting, it may get the analysis wrong. The results can be very unfortunate, since you cannot use the "Tools\Language\Set Language" procedure to do what a human being would call setting the language. That is, you cannot compel the program to show Windows Arabic as Eurogibberish or vice versa. Or at least if one can do this trick, we haven't figured out how. As noted, all that procedure does is set aside some notes for spell checking. Once WinWord has decided that text is Eurogibberish, it does no good at all to select it and try to force it into a specifically Arabic font like "Arabic Transparent." Sometimes the problem can be resolved by saving the problem passage as an "encoded text" file, of course with the "Arabic (Windows)" encoding, and then reopening it. Sometimes the problem cannot be resolved at all.

When you install Office 2000 (and also Office 2001, presumably), you must notify Office specifically as well as Windows generally that you intend to use Arabic. The procedure goes like this:

Start
  Programs
    Microsoft Office Tools
      Microsoft Office Language Settings.

Then make sure the boxes labeled Arabic and Farsi are checked. The notice about these languages not being supported by the system is nothing to be alarmed about. It really only means that Microsoft wishes you had bought Windows 2000. At least for Arabic, it means that. If you want to write Persian without Windows 2000, you will need the "Arabic (Massachusetts) 101 Keys" keyboard, to which topic we may now turn.

We are now almost, but not quite, finished with Arabic-script Arabic and ready to move on to Latin-script Arabic, the really central topic of this discussion. The "transliterated keyboard" occupies an intermediate position here, since it may well be of interest to people who have no use at all for transliteration proper. The idea of it has already been indicated above. Is that market-inspector word, /mHtsb/ to be entered with keys like "kpjsf" or with keys like "mHtsb"? If you touch-type in Arabic, the answer will be obvious. On the other hand, if you touch-type in Arabic, you almost certainly won't have read this far in this document. When we have to hunt and peck in Arabic anyway, the case for what is engraved on the keys having some discernible connection with the Arabic letters intended seems overwhelming.

Unfortunately, this case does not overwhelm anybody at Microsoft. Let us all bombard Redmond with complaints until they provide something so easy to do (for them) and so useful for us. But meanwhile, we happen to have a hack.... Let us make very plain that this is a hack we are talking about. It involves rearranging a file that Microsoft does not document the format of. We am far from the first people to do this, however. The "Arabic (Massachusetts)" keyboard came into being by way of

{{ http://www.mazar.click2site.com/download/fonts.htm }},

which rearranged the Microsoft Arabic keyboard file to include Persian. We would recommend it to you, conceivably, except that it makes Persian possible at the cost of making Arabic impossible. There is no taa marbuwta. Not serious. But you might look at the site anyway and see what you think of Mr. Mazar's Persian fonts.

For that matter, there are people out there in WWWonderland

{{ http://secondo.verat.net/~janko/engdload.htm }}

trying to sell exactly this trick, which really ought to have drawn the attention of Microsoft's lawyers if anything was ever going to. So probably we can get away with it for scholarly and nonprofit purposes.

The trick consists of replacing the file KBDA1.KBD (in a canonical installation of Windows, C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\KBDA1.KBD) with something different that has the same filename. This replacement must happen after the original version from Microsoft is put in place, or else Windows will unload the original version and wipe out the new one. Once it is made, not only will the filename be the same for different contents, so will the system name. The screen shot above showed "Arabic (Saudi Arabia) 101 Keys" when in fact what is there is "Arabic (Massachusetts)." These names are not inside the keyboard files themselves, so nothing can be done about the nomenclature problem.

So there it is. If you want it, you can download it and see what you think. That is, you can do so if you have Windows 95 or 98 or Me. The keyboard files for NT/2000 are organized entirely differently.

It is important to mention that in addition to transliterating the keyboard, so to speak, "Arabic (Massachusetts)" allows you to write Persian. On this front again it is a puzzle what Microsoft can possibly be thinking of. When you downloaded the "Arabic Text Support" package for IE5, you acquired fonts that contain the extra letters for Persian, but the only way you will get a keyboard that knows about them from Microsoft is to buy Windows 2000. Why didn't they at least put it into Office? There soen't seem to be any good commercial reason for their policy, and the fact that a Persian keyboard is available in any version makes plain that it cannot somehow have to do with boycotting the Islamic Republic.

A screen shot of the keyboard layout will not be inserted at this point, because the "Microsoft Visual Keyboard" also pretends not to know that the Persian letters are in those fonts and puts up square boxes instead. Suffice it to say that here in Massachusetts the Arabic alphabet runs

c ! b p t + % j C H x d ] r z J s $ S D T Z & g f q G K l m n h w y e

Let us quote one famous line, putting some vowel keystrokes in,

!lsyfu 'Sdqu 'nb!cA mn !lktbi * fy Hd:hi !lHd:u byn !ljid:i w!ll&ibi

As to "Windows Persian," let those who are interested examine our separate discussion of some of the problems and peculiarities thereof.

N.B., Codepage 1256 is not itself an Arabic font. How could it be? It assigns only one number for each letter, whereas most letters need three or four different glyphs in an Arabic font. On the other hand, one mark for one Arabic letter is (more or less) what we want in a transliteration scheme. It would be crazy to try to represent absolute-final-initial-medial variants in Latin letters, as crazy as to try to indicate where Arabic has fancy ligatures. To illustrate how it works, here is that search result from al-Muhaddith (minus the HTML and plus a little formatting) displayed first in "Xlit1256" and then in "Times New Roman":

äÊíÌÉ 1 ãä 70
ÇáÌÇãÚ áÃÍßÇã ÇáÞÑÂä¡ ÇáÅÕÏÇÑ 1.52 - ááÅãÇã ÇáÞÑØÈí
ÇáÌÒÁ 7 ãä ÇáØÈÚÉ
}} ÓæÑÉ ÇáÃÚÑÇÝ }} ÇáÂíÉ: 58 {æÇáÈáÏ ÇáØíÈ íÎÑÌ äÈÇÊå ÈÅÐä ÑÈå æÇáÐí ÎÈË áÇ íÎÑÌ ÅáÇ äßÏÇ ßÐáß äÕÑÝ ÇáÂíÇÊ áÞæã íÔßÑæä}--ãÒíÏ-- ÞÊÇÏÉ: ãËá ááãÄãä íÚãá ãÍÊÓÈÇ ãÊØæÚÇ¡ æÇáãäÇÝÞ ÛíÑ ãÍÊÓȺ ÞÇá ÑÓæá Çááå Õáì Çááå Úáíå æÓáã: (æÇáÐí äÝÓí ÈíÏå áæ íÚáã ÃÍÏåã Ãäå íÌÏ ÚÙãÇ ÓãíäÇ Ãæ ãÑãÇÊíä ÍÓäÊíä áÔåÏ ÇáÚÔÇÁ). "äßÏÇ" äÕÈ Úáì ÇáÍÇá¡ æåæ ÇáÚÓÑ ÇáããÊäÚ ãä ÅÚØÇÁ ÇáÎíÑ. æåÐÇ ÊãËíá. ÞÇá ãÌÇåÏ: íÚäí Ãä Ýí Èäí ÂÏã ÇáØíÈ æÇáÎÈíË. æÞÑà ØáÍÉ "ÅáÇ äßÏÇ" ÍÐÝ ÇáßÓÑÉ áËÞáåÇ. æÞÑà ÇÈä ÇáÞÚÞÇÚ "äßÏÇ" ÈÝÊÍ --ãÒíÏ&(ãÌãæÚ ÇáÃÍÑÝ: 972)

äÊíÌÉ 1 ãä 70 ÇáÌÇãÚ áÃÍßÇã ÇáÞÑÂä¡ ÇáÅÕÏÇÑ 1.52 - ááÅãÇã ÇáÞÑØÈí ÇáÌÒÁ 7 ãä ÇáØÈÚÉ }} ÓæÑÉ ÇáÃÚÑÇÝ }} ÇáÂíÉ: 58 {æÇáÈáÏ ÇáØíÈ íÎÑÌ äÈÇÊå ÈÅÐä ÑÈå æÇáÐí ÎÈË áÇ íÎÑÌ ÅáÇ äßÏÇ ßÐáß äÕÑÝ ÇáÂíÇÊ áÞæã íÔßÑæä}--ãÒíÏ-- ÞÊÇÏÉ: ãËá ááãÄãä íÚãá ãÍÊÓÈÇ ãÊØæÚÇ¡ æÇáãäÇÝÞ ÛíÑ ãÍÊÓȺ ÞÇá ÑÓæá Çááå Õáì Çááå Úáíå æÓáã: (æÇáÐí äÝÓí ÈíÏå áæ íÚáã ÃÍÏåã Ãäå íÌÏ ÚÙãÇ ÓãíäÇ Ãæ ãÑãÇÊíä ÍÓäÊíä áÔåÏ ÇáÚÔÇÁ). "äßÏÇ" äÕÈ Úáì ÇáÍÇá¡ æåæ ÇáÚÓÑ ÇáããÊäÚ ãä ÅÚØÇÁ ÇáÎíÑ. æåÐÇ ÊãËíá. ÞÇá ãÌÇåÏ: íÚäí Ãä Ýí Èäí ÂÏã ÇáØíÈ æÇáÎÈíË. æÞÑà ØáÍÉ "ÅáÇ äßÏÇ" ÍÐÝ ÇáßÓÑÉ áËÞáåÇ. æÞÑà ÇÈä ÇáÞÚÞÇÚ "äßÏÇ" ÈÝÊÍ --ãÒíÏ&(ãÌãæÚ ÇáÃÍÑÝ: 972)

That display was created by copying the text out of MINIPAD, where it naturally appears as "real Arabic," pasting it into WinWord 2.0 twice, and then applying the fonts mentioned to the two copies of it. Plus some HTML for the web, admittedly, but nothing that affects the text itself. The Eurogibberish and/or "Xlit1256" transliteration simply IS Windows Arabic.

A detailed discussion of how "Xlit1256" looks and why, giving examples of Windows Arabic with different degrees of vocalization is available for examination.

To summarize that material briefly, the above specimen admittedly does not look very much like how scholars usually transliterate Arabic, but it is important to understand that the main reason it doesn't is that the Orientalists put in almost all of the vowels and the Arabs leave almost all of them out. Englsh wld strt lkng vry strng too if we took to doing that.

Trivially, the above specimen would look a bit more Orientalistic if there were underscored t and d instead of eð and þorn. If you prefer it that way, we could make up a font that does it that way. The points about the representation that are not indifferent and that some will probably dislike are especially the exclamation mark for 'alif and the plus for tá’ marbúta+, and maybe the e for 'alif maqsúra+.

These points all have to do with cases where the scholars want to write what is one single thing in Arabic script or Arabic pronunciation a number of different ways in Latin script. Given what is happening with "Xlit1256," that we are just laying a font on top of Codepage 1256 and not deploying any software that could recognize and contextualize and treat different cases differently, we must choose one mark for each code number Microsoft represents Arabic with and stick with it in all cases. Therefore it is better to write 'alif as an exclamation point (which at least looks like the original) rather than as either an apostrophe/smooth breathing or as a long A vowel somehow indicated, because those representations will be spectacularly wrong in lots of cases.

The extreme case of this problem is shadda, which the Orientalists want to write as many different ways as there are consonants. We can't do that with just a font. Shadda doesn't happen to occur in the above extract. We have decided to use that superscript 2 that exists more or less uselessly in the standard vanilla ANSI/USA Windows Codepage 1252. That is to say, the name of the mark in question is ÔóÏøóÉ. Or more likely, ÔÏøÉ. Even more likely is ÔÏÉ, but the point would disappear if we wrote it that way in this context.

"Xlit1256" is the ultimate in Cheap Windows Arabic. Get used to it a little, and you don't need to worry about downloading IE5 with exactly the right options. You can just point your good old Mozilla 0.0 at the front page of al-Warráq and tell it what font to use, and there you are:

The usefulness of "Xlit1256" Arabic for making out what other people have written already is manifest, but why would anybody want to write MORE of it from scratch, especially if she has WinWord 9 (or even just MINIPAD)? We have assumed that nobody would. But that was a mistake. It can in fact be quite useful, and there is no reason we should not reveal this fact to the world. (Let us at this point stop putting quotes around the name of one font and use "Xlit1256 Arabic" to mean the general idea which that font involves, the idea of displaying Arabic as a left-to-right language with an alphabet defined by Codepage 1256. Exactly what glyphs are used in such a display is a different and lower-order sort of question. "Helvetica" and "Baskerville" are not the names of two different languages, only of two very superficially different ways of writing Latin.)

We used Xlit1256 Arabic for preparing our first Arabic bilingual webpage, namely,

The Al-’Asma‘í Sheep Page

Alasmaei Capitula XVII DE OVE (Linguâ Arabicâ Confecta)
ÇáÇÕãÚí -- ÃäÈÇÁ ÇáÚáãÇÁ Ýí ÃÓãÇÁ ÇáÔÇÁ

{meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1256"}

We've already seen in those MINIPAD examples what becomes of HTML when one attempts to manipulate Arabic-script Arabic directly. As you'll probably soon learn from struggling with WinWord 9, really bilingual and bidirectional text, paragraphs and sentences in English with chunks of Arabic in them or the other way around, is not just twice as hard to manage as one language alone, but at least four times as hard. Maybe EIGHT times as hard. With the above arrangement, we revert to the vicinity of twice as hard, since you do still have to switch "languages" in a case like the HTML scap above. That is to say, you must switch keyboards from (in this case) "Polish (Programmers)" to "Arabic (Massachusetts)."

The Arabic transliteration characters of the "Xlit1256" font were deliberately borrowed from a sans-serif font and embedded in a typewriter one. This hybrid arrangement was needed because it is important to be able to see at a glance that

that "barf" is not the equivalent of "ÈóÑÝ."

That whole centered line is shown in "Xlit1256." The two four-letter words in it are utterly different. If it were part of that sheep HTML page, the second instance would appear as Arabic-script Persian.

Since the two strings are not at all the same, searching for one will not find the other. And this point is more than just a nuisance, because it affords a quick, although inelegant, solution to an obvious problem that arises now that so many long books are available in Windows Arabic. How can you search them? In general, that is, and not because somebody gave you a search program that goes only with a particular corpus on that particular CD-ROM? Well, with Expensive Windows Arabic you can load a text like al-Tabarí's Qur'án commentary into WinWord 9 and wait a week for all 15,557,993 bytes to load, and after that, search it in Arabic-script Arabic. (There are a bunch of things you ought to know about before trying to search and sort Arabic with the brontosaur, but further research is needed before writing them up for you.)

Or use Cheap Windows Arabic and UltraEdit, set the font to "Xlit1256," switch the keyboard to Massachusetts Arabic, bring up the search box and type in "mHtsb" (i.e., "ãÍÊÓÈ") and you can know in about five seconds rather than fifteen minutes that it occurs five times and, with a little puzzling, discern what the context around each occurence the word means. After you decide that the third one looks interesting, you can cut it out and then paste it over to the brontosaur and print it out in loveliest Tahoma.

By this term we mean such academic enterprises as the preparation of lexicons or concordances with computer tools. That last search procedure begins to get into the general area. With nothing more than UltraEdit (and the old 16-bit version at that), we could search 94 files (296,997,784 bytes) and get a report that runs to about 800 (wrapped) lines and is formatted as follows:

----------------------------------------
Find 'ãÍÊÓÈ' in 'SBUKR.TXT' :
SBUKR.TXT(16701): % ÓÃáÊ ÑÓæá Çááå Õáì Çááå Úáíå æÓáã Úä ÇáØÇÚæä¡ ÝÃÎÈÑäí Ãäå: (ÚÐÇÈ íÈÚËå Çááå Úáì ãä íÔÇÁ¡ æÃä Çááå ÌÚáå ÑÍãÉ ááãÄãäíä¡ áíÓ ãä ÃÍÏ íÞÚ ÇáØÇÚæä¡ ÝíãßË Ýí ÈáÏå ÕÇÈÑÇ ãÍÊÓÈÇ¡ íÚáã Ãäå áÇ íÕíÈå ÅáÇ ãÇ ßÊÈ Çááå áå¡ ÅáÇ ßÇä ãËá ÃÌÑ ÔåíÏ).

That process took less than thirty seconds. If we had been serious about the search except as an illustration, we would have printed the whole report out ("Xlit1256" looks wretched on the screen, but quite decent when printed) and then worked through it with a red pencil before deploying WinWord 9 to look at particular passages in Arabic-script Arabic.

That happens, not accidentally, to be essentially the same search we did at

{{ mail.muhaddith.org }},

where we found only 70 instances. Those 94 books are the al-Muhaddith treasury, downloaded and unzipped without reference to their own indexing software. The difference (presumably) is that they were matching for the exact word, whereas we matched just the string of characters, which could be embedded in a longer word. As in fact you can see in the above instance from the Sahíh of al-Bukhárí that the match found was with /mHtsb!/ (accusative singular indefinite) and not with the citation form of the word.

This example should give a general idea of what we mean by text processing, namely pretending (if at all possible) that Arabic is a European language written left to right and without connections or contextual variants of the letters, and then using the million-and-one existing tools to work with it, only reverting to Arabic-script Arabic at the very end when displaying the results. Codepage 1256 presents no obstacle in itself to this approach. But problems do arise, problems which mean that the Xlit1256 approach by itself is not all we need. For instance, the best concordance program we have found seems unable to handle Windows Arabic because some of the values in it would (in Codepage 1252, or Eurogibberish) be upper- and lower-case variations of one another and therefore, in this program's unfortunate opinion, interchangable.

This section will be the last. It is centered around the second of our give-away fonts. This one is called "Dushizat" for reasons to be explained shortly, and it is available for download here.

The object of this font is to make it easier to write Arabic the way that academic Orientalists in Europe in fact do write it in learned articles and books. There is, however, a good deal of variation in their practice, partly from country to country, and partly on the basis of whether one likes or dislikes digraphs as opposed to letters with diacritics. It has, incidentally, come to mind that somebody might desire a font with all these variations included in it, so that one could reproduce exactly what Brockelmann or Massignon or Levi della Vida or the Encyclopaedia of Islam actually wrote in such-and-such a place. It would contain, for instance, G with a dot above it, with a line above it, with a hachek above it, with a breve above it for Turkish, and maybe more variations still. That might be called a maximum transliteration font. "Dushizat" is a minimum one. Minimalism is where the mysterious name comes from. The very least needed over and above ASCII (or call it plain A-to-Z) to write Arabic in the Orientalistic way is

D and S and H and Z and T   with dots under them, plus
U and I and A               with macrons.

The mnemonic "Dushizat" refers to that inventory. The word defines an absolute minimum; the actual "Dushizat" font is a little more generous. You also get E and O with macrons, plus optional versions of 'ayn and 'alif. (Optional, because you could use the rough and smooth breathings (0x91-0x92 in Codepage 1252) or even the grave accent and apostrophe of plain ASCII.) Here is the Arabic (Massachusetts) alphabet again, with an approximate version in "Dushizat":

c ! b p t + % j C H x d ] r z J s $ S D T Z & g f q G K l m n h w y e

' (å) b p (t/h/-) th j ch � kh d dh r z zh s sh ÿ ð ƒ æ � gh f q k g k l m n h w y (å)

And what ’Abú Tammám wrote would be Orientalized as something like

Al-sayfu 'aÿdaqu 'anbå"an mina 'l-kutubi * f‚ �addihi 'l-�addu bayna 'l-jiddi wa-l-la�ibi

We have written at length elsewhere on the relationship of Orientalist transliteration to Arabic-script Arabic. In general, the worst problem is that you pretty well have to put in almost all the short vowels, which requires that you know which vowels to put in.

Apart from that challenge, which pertains to any Orientalizing representation, the worst problem with "Dushizat" in particular is the necessity of digraphs with H as the second member. Of course no learned Arabist would ever dream that the word 'ashalu has a shiyn in it and not a siyn followed by a há’, yet all but the best might stumble over less common words. The matter of having to put in all the vowels is pertinent here. If you don't put them in and you also use -h digraphs, all those third-person suffixes beginning with há’ become a real puzzle in analysis. One can, with E. G. Browne, write such a word 'as-halu, to be sure.

Furthermore, some of us purely esthetically have never liked the look of such digraphs when they have to be doubled, as in, say, yuhadhdhibuhá.

When it came to making up a font, however, we decided to abandon esthetics and aim at a minimal representation, because every glyph that is required for transliterated Arabic means something else has to be sacrificed. With "Dushizat" what is sacrificed from Codepage 1252 is mainly Scandinavian/Germanic glyphs plus a few of the less frequent special symbols. (Hopefully the less frequent ones -- our judgment may not overlap with yours.) As it is, you can still write French and German and Italian and Spanish and Latin and Portugeuse as well as English and Arabic and Persian without ever needing to switch to another font. "Dushizat" is designed for the small class of people who might conceivably wish to do exactly that in the course of a single document, or even perhaps a single paragraph.

In fact, a stronger reason for minimalism than the font is the keyboard. The glyphs needed for all these languages have to be available with combinations of keystrokes which are not too contortionistic and above all which can be remembered easily. The "United States-International" keyboard, US-IK, which has already been mentioned, was where we started on the keyboard end. As with the "Arabic (Massachusetts)" keyboard for Arabic-script Arabic, the "Dushizat" keyboard for Latin-script Arabic has the same name as a Microsoft keyboard file, but somewhat different contents. This item again will be of use only to Windows 95-98-Me customers. The full details are available in the download package here.

In summary, we have (1) put the Arabic in where Microsoft has those Nordic letters and special characters, (2) retained all the German-French-Spanish items, but removed some redundant synonymous ways of doing them present in the original US-IK, and (3) switched the dead key for the acute accent and umlaut one step to the left, using the semi-colon key rather than the apostrophe key. The result, as regards typing Latin-script Arabic, goes like this

	a with macron   {AltGr}{A}
	d with dot      {AltGr}{D}
	e with macron   {AltGr}{E}
	h with dot      {AltGr}{H}
	i with nacron   {AltGr}{I}
	o with macron   {AltGr}{O}
	s with dot      {AltGr}{S}
	t with dot      {AltGr}{T}
	u with dot      {AltGr}{U}
	z with dot      {AltGr}{Z}
	(ayn            {AltGr}{Q}
	)alif           {AltGr}{P}

With the first nine of these, the upper-case letters add {Shift}:

Å Ð � Ý ª ¯ Ÿ Þ Ø Æ.

Unfortunately there exist laptop computers that dispense with this second {Alt} key. The recommended solution is to plug in a full-size keyboard when you want to write transliterated Arabic or Persian.

The divergence from the Microsoft US-IK about French and German is that the acute accents and umlauts become available ONLY by the dead-key method. The synonymous {AltGr} method now gives the Arabic items.

Shifting the dead key for acute/umlaut has nothing to do with Arabic, since as you can see from the above table, Dushizat Arabic doesn't use the dead keys. At issue is an objection to the Microsoft US-IK in its original form. Single and double quotes are very likely to be followed by vowels, which then on the US-IK turn up minus the quote mark but plus an unwanted diacritic. Maddening! Semi-colon and colon, on the other hand, are most likely to be followed by a space, which with Microsoft dead keys forces the literal dead key to be displayed.

Here is where that exotic "Polish (Programmers)" keyboard finally comes in. The Polish language is nothing to the purpose, because this is a plain English keyboard unless you go out looking for trouble with {AltGr}. The point of installing it is that it has no dead keys at all, which is what a programmer needs when writing "A80D:E934" and suchlike character sequences that would scarcely occur in the everyday prose of any language. If one could have two different keyboards active for English, that solution would be preferable. As with providing a transliterated keyboard for the Middle East, Microsoft could improve the product with extreme ease, whereas working from the outside one is reduced to strange and kludgey strategies.

Between the discussion above of installing the "Arabic (Massachusetts)" keyboard and the explanations included with the download packages and the other discussions linked to, that is all we need say here about the "Dushizat" package. To conclude, here are links to a couple of webpages mainly or entirely written in it: