I’ve learned the lovely Arabic alphabet and I know how to kludge a few sentences in Word and HTML, ligatures and all. But I’m curious as to how they did it before the computer–on typewriters. How’d they ligature the letters and add vowel marks? Did the keyboard have a couple hundred keys for all forms of the letters with marks, or did they use some other method?
I once used an Arabic manual typewriter. It had about the same number of keys as an English typewriter. The connecting forms were, I think, on the nonshift keys and the isolated forms used the shift key. I think it didn’t have any keys for the vowel marks. You know, it’s been so many years since I used it, I don’t remember exactly how it was configured. But no—none of that Chinese megatypewriter stuff here.