by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/06/01 21:10 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/06/01/613641.aspx
Jason Kane asked in the Suggestion Box:
Hello, I'd like to know a bit of background on the reasons taken to deviate from keyboard standards in the Microsoft layouts.
For instance the Arabic Yeh with Hamza would be Unicode 0626 in the new Pashto (Afghanistan) keyboard but Microsofts new implementaion (897338) uses FE89 presentation form which as far as I can tell has no advantage and a pretty major disadvantage (0626 will join to stuff, FE89 doesn't).
Just curious!
An excellent point -- one that I have even mentioned myself in posts like It does not always pay to be compatible in the past.
This was actually a bug in an earlier version of the layout which has since been fixed. The fix first made it into the source tree back in December of last year, so any recent build or Beta 2 should have the update.
And of course Vista keeps looking better with newer builds, so there are probably other reasons to upgrade to later builds. :-)
This post brought to you by ﺉ (U+fe89, a.k.a. ARABIC LETTER YEH WITH HAMZA ABOVE ISOLATED FORM)
beltun on 20 Nov 2007 12:09 AM:
Personally I hate the pashto keyboard layout 100%. It is not a very efficient layout at all, the previous downloaded version to work with windows xp was much more efficient alef is on a, laam is on l, seen is on s, xheen is on x, wow is on o it's totally logical and i can type away on it. Anyways does anyone know if i can make my own keyboard layout in windows?
Michael S. Kaplan on 20 Nov 2007 12:13 AM:
That is what MSKLC is for! You can download it from here....
Mike Maxwell on 6 Oct 2009 4:32 PM:
I know this is an olde post, but.... We just got bit by this problem. Our office is still using XP (Long live XP!), and some of our folks noticed that we were getting some presentation forms in Pashto. Is this problem fixed in some XP update? (and which one?)