title: Arabic: how to conveniently enter dagger-vowels (AKA miniature vowels) and alif-wasla with PC keyboard
body: <p>I would like to enter <code>dagger-alif</code>, <code>dagger-waw</code>, and <code>dagger-ya</code>
  (AKA miniature alif, miniature wow, and miniature ya) as well
  as <code>alif-wasla</code> with a PC Arabic keyboard. These marks are used
  to help the reader with pronounciation.</p>
  
  <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>For example the word <code>هٰذَا</code> here appears with a <code>miniature-alif</code> over the
  letter <code>ه</code> (and a fatha over the letter <code>ذ</code>) despite in regular script
  the same word would be simply written as <code>هذا</code>.</p>
  
  <p>The alif-wasla has a small mim in its initial position over the alif
  indicating that the alif is silent and looks as follows: <code>ٱ</code>.
  (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: <code>آ</code>).</p>
  
  <p>A picture of the IBM PC arabic keyboard layout can be found here:
  <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_keyboard" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_keyboard</a> . The following
  is a picture of a PC keyboard from <code>DELL</code> 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:
  <img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Uzpa1.jpg" alt="DELL PC Arabic keyboard"></p>
  
  <p>As you can see the sought diacritics are missing from the keyboard inputs.</p>
  
  <p>These symbols are also partially described here: 
  <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics</a></p>
  
  <p>The following link
  <a href="http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/671/index.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/671/index.htm</a>
  shows that I can type <code>alif-wasla</code> as <code>ALT01649</code> and
  <a href="http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0670/index.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0670/index.htm</a>
  shows that I can for instance type the <code>miniature superscript aliph</code> as <code>ALT01648</code>
  but this only seems to work in <code>MS Word</code>.
  But I cannot find a way to type these in <code>LibreOffice</code>. 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 <code>MSKLC</code> or is there some
  way of entering the missing symbols with Unicode shortcuts? Thanks.</p>