My kingdom for a Kyrgyz keyboard layout!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/03/02 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/03/02/10135888.aspx

in a comment to Kyrgyzstan, not Kazakhstan! (the "Penn -- Not Penn State' of Central Asia) (a blog whose title is a delightful homage to people like myself who spent time at the University of Pennsylvania who had to deal with ignorantdelightful people who thought that Penn meant Penn State), Aytmatov.biz opined:

Hello , as you konw ,we ,kyrgyz lives in China ,use the arabic alphabet , there are lot's of difculties in information processing by Computer , just because no Arabic_kyrgyz input method in any Operating system now . So is it possible to add our language's input method in Windows8 ?  (Iust like Uyghur input method in Windows7)

This is a valid point.

Now it is true that just about every Arabic script language other than Arabic claims use of the Perso-Arabic script, but even though Urdu, Uyghur, Dari, Pashto, Sindhi, Persian, and so on all fall under that Peso-Arabic label that their letter are slightly different.

If you look at the alphabet currently used for Kyrgyz, it is something like:

Now if you look across all of the keyboards for Arabic script languages that ship on Windows, there is good news, okay news, and bad news.

GOOD NEWS:

You can find most of these letters on all of the keyboards that we have. Every one of these languages have some characters in common, and the keyboards show this.

OKAY NEWS:

Of the other letters above that are not on every keyboard, youi can find them on at least one keyboard on Windows.

BAD NEWS:

There is no one keyboard that has every letter in the above table on it.

Obviously the ideal situation has the exact layout people expect available, but absent that a layout with all the letters on it is a vaguely acceptable second-best.

Thus it is too bad that (for example):

• U+0686 is only on the Urdu and Uyghur keyboard layouts, and
• U+06c9 is only on the Pashto keyboard layout, and
• U+06c7 is only on the Pashto and Uyghur keyboard layouts, and
• U+06ad is only on the Uyghur keyoard layout, and
• U+06af is only on the Persian, Urdu, Uyghur, and Persian keyboard layouts, and
• U+06cb is only on the Uyghur keyboard layout.

Thus the only way to comfortably support Arabic script Kyrgyz is to use something like MSKLC to create a new layout.

As the above list hints, the Uyghur keyboard is probably closest as a starting point, though.

As for next version, I can barely even see it and definitely couldn't talk about it, but obviously the biggest push for layouts that are 100% in the "good" category is languages that have locales, which doesn't apply to the Arabic script Kyrgyz. and although we do have all the letters in our fonts, the sort order may also be wrong for Kyrgyz, which is another potential problem. Note that Windows does not have any layout that isn't associated with a locale.

But I'll forward the request on to the people who look at that sort of thing (I was unable to find a commonly used standard layout in the form of a .KLC file, which is another challenge to seeing anything built in)...

John Cowan on 2 Mar 2011 10:46 AM:

MS on 2 Mar 2011 2:02 PM:

Beles on 1 Apr 2011 6:37 AM:

Beles on 1 Apr 2011 6:38 AM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 1 Apr 2011 9:15 AM:

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