The Persian Letter Yeh

 This is THE problem letter in Persian computing.  While the Arabic letter Yeh always has two dots underneath (except Alif Maqsura), the Persian Yeh has dots only in initial and medial position. 

The letter Yeh in Persian when in final position has no dots underneath.

The Persian Yeh is officially called

Arabic letter Farsi Yeh

Unicode symbol: U+06CC

Information on the Yeh is of particular interest to those with Win2000.  Microsoft shipped the first Win2000's with incorrect mapping of the Yeh on the keyboard. Not only that, the Times New Roman and Tahoma fonts produced at the same time have defective Yeh's. (There are many folks out there with harrowing tales of woe and suffering about trying to type the Persian Yeh!)

If you have a later Win2000 or have updated your Win2000 with the Service Pack, your keyboard and Tahoma font should now be correct.

Be sure to update your fonts and everything else here: http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com

And if you download the latest Internet Explorer, it will update webfonts: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie

Please go to http://www.openroad.net.au/support/notes/persian.html for the complete story.

If you happen to be surfing Persian websites, you'll notice  a great many of them are using the Arabic Yeh which gives itself away in final position with the two dots underneath.  (Often you're blissfully unaware of this due to the mini-fontsize used on most Persian websites and so you can't even see the dots let alone the Yeh itself but I'll save that rant for another day.)  Although most of the offenders use the Arabic Yeh simply because they don't really notice or care,  one or two actually are using it on purpose to allow for the above-mentioned defective fonts.  They figure it's better to have the two dots on the final Yeh than have the medial Yeh appear in isolated form. I quote Roozbeh Pournader:

Some computers still have those buggy and not-yet-updated Windows 2000/IE 5 fonts with the Persian Yeh problem. So some experts will encode their web pages with an Arabic Yeh in case the Yeh is in medial or initial forms. Some other computers only have IE 4 (or so the web admins claim) on Arabic Windows, which can display CP1256, but not Unicode characters that are not in it, so these web admins use Arabic Kaf and Yeh that are available in CP1256, instead of the Persian codes.

Here is a Word document (yes, it's really in .doc format although it contains some screenshots) which will help you determine if the Times New Roman or Tahoma fonts on your computer are defective or not.  If you have installed the non-standard Nazanin font, you can also see how to type the Yeh correctly in Nazanin. Again, the Times New Roman and Tahoma fonts are unicode compliant, however, they are not very "Persian" looking.  The Nazanin font is non-standard but looks nice and for just typing a Word document, it will suffice until we have a real  Unicode-compliant Persian naskh font.

Here is some supplementary reading on the Yeh for your edification.

BACK TO PERSIAN WORD-PROCESSING