The report of the need for a Uyghur hotfix may be an overstatement

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/05/28 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/05/28/10016086.aspx

Okay, it all started with The inappropriate nature of getting the Feh out of Uighur, where I pointed out, due to rather frantic and passionate last-minute feedback about a reported problem with the Uyghur keyboard, a change was made, pretty much at the last minute.

And how, as it ended up, the report was in error: how the original keyboard was correct and the changed keyboard was in fact a break.

Then, not quite two years later, in The inappropriate nature of getting the Feh out of Uighur, Windows 7 edition, I explained how the bug was fixed by renaming that essentially incorrect keyboard to add a "(legacy)" to the name, and adding a new keyboard with the correct letter.

Not perfect to my way of thinking, mind you, since they chose not to add the collation equivalencies I suggested. But they may have actually considered that and gotten feedback to not do it. So that may have been the correct behavior; I don't know.

But all's well as ends well, right?

Well, not quite.

At the beginning of this week, someone with the handle One Uyghur posted a note in the Suggestion Box:

 Dear Michael Kaplan,

I hope, at least, this is the one way to contact you.

I am a Uyghur (Uighur) currently living in the US. We (a group of Uyghur Computing fans living around the world) have found some problems in Uyghur Keyboard Layout in Microsoft Windows 7.

We hope to discuss it with you about it, and if possible, we hope Microsoft can release a hotfix to correct the current problems.

Your notice to this problem and timely response are greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

One Uyghur

 

Hmmm.

Anonymous people. Always makes me worry a bit, since no information was included to help know what we're talking about.

So anyway, I hadn't quite gotten around to formulating the reply (which to be honest would have been little more than a request for the information that the specific 'group of Uyghur computing fans living around the world" could share to describe the problem that they wanted to report.

I took the precaution of digging up the work I did to make sure the whole alphabet was supported, which I didn't use last time. But I'll use it now, just cause. I mean I was hearing a vague report about keyboard problems. And we had seen those previously:

I verified the new keyboard had every letter (the ARABIC LETTER YEH WITH HAMZA ABOVE was put on a separate key, but everything here was typeable).

Other reports I had seen of the need for ﺉ and ﺌin Uyghur (that's ARABIC LETTER YEH WITH HAMZA ABOVE ISOLATED FORM and ARABIC LETTER YEH WITH HAMZA ABOVE MEDIAL FORM, compatibility characters in Unicode) would also not be needed -- they were handled already by having ARABIC LETTER YEH WITH HAMZA ABOVE there. This Hamza on a tooth (as I heard it called a few times), was covered.

The work I had done, I puit aside. I figured I'd write up my question about what exactly is missing at some point.

But the next day, One Uyghur apparently found the report of the fixed Windows 7 keyboard I mentioned in The inappropriate nature of getting the Feh out of Uighur, Windows 7 edition and left a comment to it:

Yes, the bug is fixed. But there are still some problems with this Uyghur keyboard layout.

I would like to know how Microsoft makes the local keyboard layout for some of the language. I mean, while making the Uyghur keyboard layout, which authority or standard does Microsoft follow?

I am a Uyghur and among the 12 Uyghur punctuation marks, 3 are missing on Uyghur keyboard. And moreover, we also need to type TATWEEL (or KASHIDA, U+0640, en.wikipedia.org/.../Kashida), but we can not with the current keyboard layout on Windows 7.

Is there anyway that Microsoft will issue a hotfix to fix the problems with the current Uyghur keyboard layout?

Hmmm.

Well first there is Does MS pull new keyboard layouts out of their @!#$%? that answers that first question.

And the comment does count as more information, too.

Kind of.

First the Kashida. The Tatweel.

I talked about that a bit back in You've got to be kashidding me, but really this is not a letter we tend to add to any Arabic script keyboards so far as I know, any more than we add the SOFT HYPHENto keyboards. The "character" is there for compatibility with old standards and fine Arabic typography really calls more for using Arabic justification as supported by libraries like Uniscribe that will fill in its own Kashidas (possibly with hints on where you want them) rather than injecting these "non-letters" into the text stream.

People may wish to use the TATWEEL and if you do use it, then it will work, but really the most common way to see them is in legacy applications that insert them in order to do their own justification system. Not by adding to the keyboard layout....

I do not expect such a fix to really be making it into the keyboard any time soon, really.

So let's focus on the rest of the report -- the "12 Uyghur punctuation marks, three of which are missing", I mean.

I had seen various reports on the web of a few "special Arabic punctuation marks", namely "؛ ؟ ،" (U+061b U+061f U+060c aka ARABIC SEMICOLON, ARABIC QUESTION MARK, and ARABIC COMMA).

But all of those are on the keyboard. So it isn't those three.

Even if it had been, this is not the thing of hotfixes....

There are other punctuation marks on the keyboard, but I don't know which ones the One Uyghur group are referring to as missing....

Though remembering one of the lessons of the original bug in The inappropriate nature of getting the Feh out of Uighur, where we had an actual letter wrong, and did not fix it until the new version of Windows, it seems very unlikely that any form of punctuation would be the subject of any kind of hotfix or really even service pack fix.

Also remembering the most important lesson: don't fix your product without enough substantive information to determine what fix, if any is needed.

I am not on the team that owns keyboard layouts anymore, let alone the person checking in the changs, but to be honest I doubt any change like that would ever be made without a pointer to a national standard that described a widely used layout or documentation on an actual provided hardware layout that was in wide use. Even in a new version.

Just as the burned child fears the fire. And in that sense, the folks who push for a bug to be added ruined the more easygoing verification tendencies in the face of passionate interest.

So without even getting the full information, my answer to the question: "Is there any way that Microsoft will issue a hotfix to fix the problems with the current Uyghur keyboard layout?" is probably not.

Working that way is not in the best interests of Uyghurs.

Or of Microsoft.

Or really of anyone -- the careful and deliberate actions based on substantive problem reports with supporting evidence is the way a product like Windows, the way a company like Microsoft, has to behave....

One Uyghur on 31 May 2010 5:34 PM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 31 May 2010 7:07 PM:

Random832 on 2 Jun 2010 7:43 AM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 2 Jun 2010 8:20 AM:

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