Arabic letter peh, final form

It is the final connected shape of peh, the /p/ letter.

Peh was added as Persian adapted Arabic writing for a sound Arabic lacked. New Persian poetry in Arabic script appears in eastern and northeastern Iran in the 9th century; the first original written records of Persian in Arabic script date from the 11th century. Carefully made early manuscripts already show پ, though the dotted letter was used sparingly.

Pahlavi was an earlier writing system used for Persian, but it is not the source of peh's shape: Arabic script replaced it in much Persian writing, and Persian writing then added letters such as peh. Orthographies recorded from the mid-11th to mid-13th centuries list peh among letters added for Persian. The letter's /p/ sound is also used in Urdu, Pashto, Kurdish, Baluchi, Punjabi, Kashmiri, and Sindhi writing traditions.

Should I type ﭗ or پ?

Type پ in ordinary text; shaping supplies the final form.

For Persian, Urdu, or related Arabic-script text, enter the base letter پ (U+067E). The text engine shapes it to fit its neighbors. U+FB57 is a compatibility form for older encodings; presentation forms are not recommended for regular text.

Unicode compatibility normalization maps U+FB57 to U+067E under NFKC. Use the pre-shaped character only when working with legacy data or testing a rendering issue.

Why does ﭗ look different in text?

Its shape shows where peh connects in the word.

Arabic-script letters change shape with their position and connections. Peh takes this final form when it joins the letter before it in the word. If it cannot connect, it can appear in its isolated shape; its initial and medial shapes connect differently. Fonts may draw the contours differently, but the letter stays peh.

The other peh forms are positional shapes of the same letter: ﭖ is isolated, ﭘ is initial, and ﭙ is medial. ب is a different letter, beh; its one dot distinguishes it from peh's three.