Step by step
How to use the arabic keyboard
- 1The keyboard above is already set to Arabic; you can switch language from the list if you need another.
- 2Click the keys on screen, or just type — your own keyboard is remapped to the layout shown.
- 3Use Shift for the second layer, which carries the rest of the characters.
- 4Copy the text when you are done, or download it as a .txt file.
Why type Arabic in a browser
Adding Arabic to an operating system is a settings-menu expedition that ends in a keyboard you cannot see: the letters are not printed on your keys, so you are typing blind in a script you may have no muscle memory for, and you have changed a system-wide setting to write one line.
The usual workaround is worse — hunting characters in a character-map utility and pasting them one at a time, or copying words out of search results and hoping the spelling survived the trip.
A visible keyboard solves the specific problem of writing Arabic occasionally: typing a name or a place correctly rather than transliterating it, searching for something in Arabic when your keyboard has no Arabic on it, or adding an Arabic line to a document, a card or a design. Every key is on screen, the arrangement is the standard one, and when you are finished there is nothing to undo.
Letters that change shape as you type them
Arabic letters take four forms depending on where they sit in a word — isolated, initial, medial and final — and the difference is dramatic. ع alone looks nothing like the ع in the middle of a word. This is handled for you: you type one character per letter, and the browser's text shaping chooses the form.
So the keyboard has one key per letter, not four, and a word assembles itself as you go. A letter that looked isolated a moment ago will redraw when the next letter arrives, which is correct rather than a glitch.
Six letters never join to what follows them — ا د ذ ر ز و — which is why Arabic words break into visible chunks. That too is automatic; there is nothing to type differently.
Right to left, and where the cursor goes
The text box switches to right-to-left for Arabic, and the cursor starts at the right. Typing feels normal once you accept that direction; what confuses people is mixing scripts. An Arabic sentence containing an English word, a number or a URL puts those runs left-to-right inside a right-to-left line, and the cursor jumps around the boundaries.
This is the bidirectional algorithm working as specified rather than anything going wrong, and the stored text is in the order you typed it regardless of where it appears on screen. Punctuation at the end of a mixed line is the place it most often looks misplaced.
Backspace deletes the character before the cursor in logical order, not the one visually to its right. For a mixed line that can mean the deletion happens somewhere you were not looking.
Harakat, hamza and the marks that are usually left off
Arabic is normally written without short vowels. The harakat — fatha, damma, kasra and the rest — are teaching and liturgical marks, present in the Quran and in children's books and absent from newspapers, messages and almost everything else. If your text has no vowel marks, that is ordinary Arabic.
Hamza is the exception that does need attention, because it is a real part of spelling and takes several written forms: أ إ ؤ ئ ء, each a separate character with its own key. Choosing the wrong carrier gives a misspelled word, not a variant.
Arabic-Indic digits ٠١٢٣ are used across much of the Arabic-speaking world alongside Latin ones, and which set is expected is regional. This layout carries the standard Arabic 101 arrangement, the same one Windows and macOS use.
Your own keyboard, remapped
Clicking keys is fine for a name and tedious for a paragraph, so the keyboard already in front of you is remapped while you type. Press the key where a Arabic letter sits on the picture and that letter is what appears, with the small grey label on each key telling you which of yours produces it.
The mapping follows the physical position of the key rather than the letter printed on it, so it lands correctly even if you already run AZERTY or Dvorak underneath. Space, Enter, Backspace and the arrow keys are left alone, and Ctrl and Cmd shortcuts pass straight through, so copy and paste keep working.
Nothing is sent anywhere. The layout is a few kilobytes of data in the page and every keystroke is handled in your browser — no request, no account, no history. That matters more than it sounds, because what people type in a script they cannot otherwise type is usually a name, an address or a message.
Answers
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a key for each form of a letter?
No. You type one character per letter and the browser chooses the initial, medial, final or isolated form automatically as the word assembles.
Why does the cursor jump when I type an English word?
Mixing left-to-right runs into right-to-left text is handled by the bidirectional algorithm. The stored text is in the order you typed it, even where it looks otherwise.
How do I type hamza?
Each carrier — أ إ ؤ ئ ء — is a separate key, because they are separate characters and the choice is part of the spelling.
Is what I type sent anywhere?
No. The layout is data in the page and every keystroke is handled in your browser. There is no request to a server, no account and no history.
Do I have to click the keys?
No. Your own keyboard is remapped to the layout shown, matched by physical key position, so it works even on a non-QWERTY system. A checkbox turns it off.