AlaaShaker's Weblog

Now, you want to type some text in Arabic, let’s say a one-page letter .. No, half-a-page letter .. Let’s even say a single paragraph, OK? How long does it take you to just find where the next letter is?!!!

No matter how much I train myself to the Arabic keyboard layout – it’s never like the English! I’m typing in every letter in this post without even looking at the keyboard, wouldn’t you just dream to do the same with Arabic text?

Instead, we all go for what we call, Franco Arabic, which is more like the native Arabic syntax in the technology world. Time goes by and we ended up with a generation that doesn’t know how to spell yasta6ee3 and yadtar (يستطيع ويضطر) without mixing up the letters ت, ط and ض ..

One of the most innovative solutions, was the Yamli approach:

Yamli is simply a search engine, that allows the user to type in Arabic text to search for without having an Arabic Keyboard – they call that the “Smart Arabic Keyboard”. The idea was originated by the end of 2007, when a couple of folks needed to search Google and were stuck as the laptop didn’t have an Arabic keyboard.

It doesn’t end at the Arabic search. Check out the Yamli Editor, a simple web-based editor with their Smart Arabic Keyboard – Just type in your text, then copy-paste it anywhere you wish. You could even incorporate their Smart Keyboard into your website, or add their Facebook Application to help you in your comments, wall-to-wall posts and messages.

So, where’s the catch? I’ll tell you – it’s all online!

Let’s say you want a similar service, locally on your PC or Laptop? I suggest you try 3arabik.

3arabik is a keyboard layout, that maps your English letters to Arabic ones; so you just press the keys in English, and it will type in the Arabic letter for it – just like Franco Arabic. Meaning ا is “A”, ب is “B”, ت is “T” and so on ..

Just to imagine, let’s say you want to type my last name for instance, “Shaker”, you need to press “s” and it will type س, “h” transforming it to ش, then “a”, “k” and “r” for ا, ك and ر – giving you شاكر.

It’s for free. The website has the installation instructions, and the keyboard mappings (if you don’t get it by intuition already). A friend of mine just sent me the link last week. It’s great honestly, but I’m till not used to it yet coz my Franco Arab is perfect as in reflecting correct pronunciation. So I always write “Shaker” wrong coz I press “e” by mistake. However, you’ll get used to it sooner or later ..

I also loved their Flash loader .. loool

– Top Image: from the ilovetypography blog