Persian Keyboard

  If you need to type Persian with lots of Arabic quotes inserted on a regular basis, this is for you.  It will save you a lot of hassle switching back and forth between Arabic and Persian input and the even greater annoyance of having to "insert" a rare character when the need arises.  Please note: this is optional.  Your computer already has a "farsi keyboard" which will suffice just fine and it is not necessary to use this new and improved keyboard at all.  Having the Arabic counterparts of Persian letters (such as the Kaf and Yeh) are also handy when using search engines like Google because many Persian websites mix and match the Arabic and Persian character sets so you may have better luck on your Persian search if you use the Arabic characters.

1) Persian Standard Keyboard aka "Persian Experimental Standard" - Win2000 and WinXP version

To get the Persian keyboard, here are directions. Note: this is for Win2000 & WinXP only. 

Make sure you have some unzipping software already such as winzip which has a free trial version if you hit "download".

Now that you have unzipping software, download this package from one of the locations given:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/farsitools/persiankeyboard.zip?download

Click on the downloaded file to unzip.

Drag the two files in the zip folder ("Persian.dll" "Persian.msi")  out of the zip folder and onto the desktop.  Close your zip folder -- you're done with that.  Somewhere on the desktop, right click >new >folder and create a new folder called i386. Drag Persian.dll into i386. Now you're done with downloading and it's time to install.

To install: Double-click the file called "Persian.msi" making sure you leave the other file called "Persian.dll" in i386. (In case you try to put them both in the same folder, the installer won't "see" Persian.dll)

Now, the rest of the keyboard installation instructions will only apply if you have already enabled FA on your computer.  If you have not yet enabled FA, it won't understand why you want to install a keyboard on a language you don't use!

Go Start > Settings > Control Panel > Regional and Language Options and open. Then

Languages > Text Services and input languages > Details and then add the Persian Experimental Keyboard (you should see it under Farsi if you were successful with the download and installation) and hit Apply and OK as shown here:

This picture is on a WinXP.

1) Persian Standard Keyboard aka "Persian Experimental Standard" - Vista version

The Vista version of the above keyboard is available here. The installation is extremely easy and there is almost nothing to do. The only tricky thing is that after unzipping all the files to one location or folder, don't mistakenly think you need to put any files into any folders, in other words, don't change the arrangement of all the files. All you need to do after unzipping is click on the setup.exe file. It will prompt you to click OK so you know it installed  itself properly. Then you may need to restart your computer. That's it. After that, you don't need to even do anything in the Control Panel (unless you want to disable the other FA keyboard so as to not have to toggle between two FA keyboards. To disable a keyboard, see the above section with the screen shots from WinXP and do the reverse process and REMOVE the FA keyboard rather than ADD it.) Whenever you have more than one keyboard enabled for any given language, if you look on your task bar (next to the clock), you'll see that next to the language, such as FA, there's a little keyboard symbol which you may depress in order to choose which of the FA keyboards you want to use. Again, in the list of keyboards, this one is called, "Persian Experimental Keyboard". Again, since it is a hassle to constantly have to toggle between keyboards for one language, if you DO want to disable the MS keyboard for Persian (FA) that ships with Windows, just look above to the previous explanation for WinXP and go into the control panel and perform roughly the reverse operation to remove the old keyboard.

Please don't think you need stickers to label your keys! You can learn the layout in just a few hours. Here are two charts below to get started. Pick whichever you like!

Or,  here is a chart (PDF file) you can print out.

And here is a much more user-friendly chart sent in by Cyrus Adam.

Note: ZWNJ is to be found on the shift-b key until that bug gets repaired!

If the keyboard doesn't type Persian characters, you may, ahem,  wish to make sure the little box down in the right, bottom corner of the screen says FA because you may be typing in ENglish or something else.

This handy keyboard was designed by the Farsiweb Project . 

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