Computer Locale Requirements for Afghanistan

In December 2002 the United Nations Development Programme Country Office for Afghanistan commissioned a report on the language support required for Pashto and Dari, Afghanistan’s official languages. In addition, the Project Team (Michael Everson of Evertype, Dublin, and Roozbeh Pournader of the FarsiWeb Project, Tehran) was successful in collecting similar information for a number of other languages of Afghanistan, namely, Southern Uzbek and Brahui. (The survey sought information on other languages, such as Hazaragi, Aimaq, Southwest Pashai, Western Balochi, and Turkmen, but conclusive responses were not available.) The reason this report has been commissioned is that none of the major computer software providers currently (May 2003) supports any of these languages – adequately or at all – and this causes serious constraints and problems for all aspects of information technology for the entire country. Language support involves inputting, display and printing, processing, and provision of a user’s locale format information. The report has been endorsed by the Ministry of Communications of the Afghan Transitional Islamic Administration. For information about software support for Afghan languages please see Enabled products. An announcment list for news about the Computer Locale Requirements of Afghanistan report is available. Subscription information is available at http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/clra

af-locales.pdf	Computer Locale Requirements for Afghanistan – UNDP report, 2003-07-29 Version 2 (typos in Uzbek keyboard specification), 2003-07-16; Version 1, 2003-05-16
9995-ps-AF.txt	Pashto Keyboard Layout: text file in ISO/IEC 9995 format
9995-fa-AF.txt	Dari Keyboard Layout: text file in ISO/IEC 9995 format
9995-uz-AF.txt	Southern Uzbek Keyboard Layout: text file in ISO/IEC 9995 format
ps.txt	General Pashto ICU data: text file
ps.utf8	General Pashto ICU data: text file in UTF-8 encoding (legible)
ps_AF.txt	Pashto ICU data for Afghanistan: text file
ps_AF.utf8	Pashto ICU data for Afghanistan: text file in UTF-8 encoding (legible)
fa_AF.txt	Dari ICU data for Afghanistan: text file
fa_AF.utf8	Dari ICU data for Afghanistan: text file in UTF-8 encoding (legible)
uz_AF.txt	Southern Uzbek ICU data for Afghanistan: text file
uz_AF.utf8	Southern Uzbek ICU data for Afghanistan: text file in UTF-8 encoding (legible)
icu-AF.zip	All these ICU locale data files (but not the report)
Note that these files are not standalone. They must be used in combination with other locale data, most importantly the “fa.txt” and “root.txt” files from ICU itself. Regarding compliance: You may NOT claim compliance to this standard specification if you are changing or extending the keyboard layouts or data files in a nontrivial way.