after a week of practicing with the arabic keys , i still type with a very slow rate that i thought of another solution to this arabic writing problem, it works best for me after getting used to it in like 2 hours or something. recently i use lyx as my favourite word processor, this procedure only works with lyx. the solution in a few words is to replace the lyx arabic keymap so that the A becomes alef and the T becomes teh and so on, instead of the typical keymap that puts the the alef on H key etc.. all you need to do is to replace the file /usr/share/lyx/kbd/arabic.kmap with the modified version (assuming you have lyx supporting arabic already)*. one problem i faced is to find equevelants for some arabic letters like 3en 3'en and 7'ah , but it wasn't that hard to find unused keys for them though it needs some practice to get used to them, a help file containing those special letters and their equevelants is made to make things easier.
you can get the files here http://mhlmi.is-a-geek.org/tiki-list_file_gallery.php?galleryId=3
- you can find informatin on how to get arabic support with lyx here http://cs.haifa.ac.il/~dekelts/lyx/arabic-instructions.txt
- it's possible to make something simillar for X
- mhlmi's blog
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can be done in katoob
you can do the same in katoob easily.
and of course you can do it system wide by making your own X keymap.
cheers, Alaa
http://www.manalaa.net
Thinking out of the box
That's an interesting approach... I use LyX a lot myself, so I'll give it a go.
By the way, when you type a `laam' and then `alef' do they look wierd in LyX? They are supposed to have this little knot at the bottom, on my machine they just end up looking like a U.
-- Linux Egypt Lice Resident
the real question is how they
the real question is how they look after you process them with LaTeX.
http://www.manalaa.net
I tried that.
dvi preview directly from LyX gave me errors, so I exported to LaTeX and ran it.
I got errors and just did the windows user thing (ctrl-d ctrl-d'ing my way past errors in blind and desparate ignorance).
To my surprise, it did generate a dvi file after all that, and it looked fine, actually.
The question now is how something like Acrobat will handle this. For example, Acrobat makes dvipdfm generated files look like utter bollocks if you don't have something like \usepackage{times} in your preamble...
-- Linux Egypt Lice Resident
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Creating custom keyboard layouts for X11 using XKB related and might be of help.