yishakomer/Profidel

Amharic ASCII and UNICODE keyboard driver ( Historical Archive) # Profidel Amharic ASCII and UNICODE keyboard driver ( Historical Archive ) # ProfidelKey – Professional Fidel Keyboard Driver > A legacy Amharic keyboard driver for Microsoft Windows, originally developed more than 22 years ago to bring Ethiopic text input to Windows before Unicode became widely supported. --- ## About the Name **Profidel** is derived from two words: - **Pro** – Professional - **Fidel (ፊደል)** – The Amharic word for the Ethiopic characters or alphabet. Together, **Profidel** represents **Professional Ethiopic Text Input**. --- # Overview ProfidelKey is a Windows keyboard driver developed in the early 2000s to enable users to type **Amharic** on Microsoft Windows during a time when the operating system provided little or no practical support for the Ethiopic script. The driver supports both: - **ASCII font-based typing** for legacy Windows applications. - **Unicode Ethiopic typing** for applications that support Unicode. One of the application's most distinctive features is **Automatic Font Detection**, which intelligently detects the active font in supported applications and automatically switches between **English**, **ASCII Amharic**, and **Unicode Amharic** typing modes. The application was written in **Borland Delphi (Object Pascal)** using the Win32 API. Today, more than two decades later, the project is being released as open source to preserve an important piece of Ethiopian software history and to serve as an educational resource for developers interested in legacy Windows programming, keyboard drivers, and multilingual computing. --- # Historical Background Amharic is the official working language of Ethiopia and is written using the **Ethiopic (Ge'ez) script**, one of the world's oldest continuously used writing systems. Unlike alphabetic writing systems such as Latin, the Ethiopic script is an **abugida**, where each consonant changes form to represent different vowel sounds. The writing system consists of: - **33 Bas …