SUMMARY KDE sends [Arabic ligature glyphs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet#Ligatures) as a single glyph. For example, Laa+Alif ligature "لا" (U+0644, U+0627) is sent as "ﻻ" (U+FEFB), and similarly for (ﻷ، ﻵ، ﻹ). STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Settings > Keyboard > Add default Arabic layout 2. Type "ﻻ" (i.e: "b" in QWERTY keyboards) OBSERVED RESULT Output is ﻻ (U+FEFB) EXPECTED RESULT Output is لا (U+0644, U+0627). SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS All latest update ADDITIONAL INFORMATION To clarify for English, this is like having a key to type a ligature. Say that you want to press "b" to type two characters: "fi" but instead you get "fi" as a single character. This is exactly what's happening with Arabic.
I don't know what part of the stack is responsible for this, but I very much doubt it's anywhere in KDE code.
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #1) > I don't know what part of the stack is responsible for this, but I very much > doubt it's anywhere in KDE code. At first I expected it to be from ibus, but then I tried a fresh installation of KDE without ibus and the problem persisted.
I cannot reproduce this Plasma 6.1.5. @AvidSeeker The sequence you expect is defined at: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libx11/-/blob/f2ebbce6d0978d2d84f840196b03ee35a3ca1736/nls/en_US.UTF-8/Compose.pre#L4523, while the relevant key in this Arabic layout is: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xkeyboard-config/xkeyboard-config/-/blob/0f42a9a5b06262e35392680a3ad3d9cad3175086/symbols/ara#L53. So you may have an issue with the Compose file parsing, which would lead to not replacing UFEFB for "لا". Do other Compose sequence work? Is there other that do not work?
Thank you for the update. There has been a lot of investigation on this issue in the past three years that I gathered in this blog post: https://avidseeker.github.io/lam-alif tldr: it affects gtk programs and there's already an issue about this to gtk. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/7678 It can be resolved by installing ibus.