Third level characters in Microsoft's Persian Standard Keyboard

[amin...@gmail.com]

Hi,

Microsoft's new Persian Standard Keyboard in Windows 10 seems to be an implementation of ISIRI-9147. In light of this, I came across an issue where I needed to type in the Arabic Subscript Alef (U+0656). As per the standard, the character is supported as a third-level mapping of "V" on Latin keyboards. On my macOS system, I do this by typing Option-v.

The third-level modifier key defined in the standard is Alt or Alt-Gr (depending on the hardware keyboard layout being either ANSI or ISO). I know this is going to be problematic on Windows because Alt combinations are normally reserved for menu shortcuts. I wonder if and how Microsoft has implemented this part of the standard. As an example, I would like to reproduce this string on Windows: ابیٖ

[amin...@gmail.com]

The third level characters are also of equal importance in the Kurdish keyboard layouts (ku and ckb). If anyone here can convince Microsoft or send them feedback, I'd suggest they consider using Alt-Gr as the 3rd level accessor, as it already is with the British keyboard. For ANSI keyboard owners (which are probably the most prevalent ones), they could assign the right Alt as a virtual Alt-Gr when the layout is active, with the option to disable such a feature for the users who don't like the reassignment. I'll keep my fingers crossed!