Arabic: how to conveniently enter dagger-vowels (AKA miniature vowels) and alif-wasla with PC keyboard

Question

I would like to enter dagger-alif, dagger-waw, and dagger-ya (AKA miniature alif, miniature wow, and miniature ya) as well as alif-wasla with a PC Arabic keyboard. These marks are used to help the reader with pronounciation.

The dagger/miniature vowels typically appear over letters in textbooks and dictionaries to show that a LONG vowel must be pronounced after a consonant even though such long vowel does not appear after the consonant. The miniature vowel is omitted from regular script such as in newspapers.

For example the word هٰذَا here appears with a miniature-alif over the letter ه (and a fatha over the letter ذ) despite in regular script the same word would be simply written as هذا.

The alif-wasla has a small mim in its initial position over the alif indicating that the alif is silent and looks as follows: ٱ. (this must not be confused with alif-madda which indicates that a hamza followed by a long aa is to be pronounced and is written with a tilda over an alif as follows: آ).

A picture of the IBM PC arabic keyboard layout can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_keyboard . The following is a picture of a PC keyboard from DELL which was more or less the Arabic PC keyboard I could find on the market to also display arabic language symbols corresponding to shift pressed:

As you can see the sought diacritics are missing from the keyboard inputs.

These symbols are also partially described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics

The following link http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/671/index.htm shows that I can type alif-wasla as ALT01649 and http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0670/index.htm shows that I can for instance type the miniature superscript aliph as ALT01648 but this only seems to work in MS Word. But I cannot find a way to type these in LibreOffice. If anyone know of some convenient manner of entering these other than cut and paste, which is what I used above, then please let me know. Can I use for instance MSKLC or is there some way of entering the missing symbols with Unicode shortcuts? Thanks.

Answer 1

The daggar alif is part of the Arabic typesetting font symbols. That's a free font which is you can find downloadable. Then you type the letter you want... for example the ha of haadhaa , set the cursor on that letter, and use INSERT.. SYMBOL and you will find that alif with other diacritics --- here's an example.

هٰذا

Peace

Answer 2

Yes, its not available on keyboard on Windows or Mac. It's a symbol to be inserted. If not on MS Word, other quick way is to google using the simple word and copy past the rich text result. HTH.

Update: On Mac, its available by using Alt + H in Arabic keyboard mode