Apple Indian Language Kit - Manual (Page 23)

Special half characters in Gurmukhi
Note that the Halant sign shown in the examples below disappears as soon as
the next character is typed. Do not type a space after the Halant to form the
new character.
The Addak matra and special characters
The Addak matra is used to double the sound of a consonant. The shape of
the Addak matra is like a crescent moon. This character cannot be typed
directly from the keyboard, but it can typed in conjunction with some other
characters as shown below.
Some Gurmukhi characters are created by typing the basic character and a
Bindi, or Nukta character.
The Nukta character and the soft Halant
Nukta consonants are formed by placing a Nukta character immediately after
the appropriate consonant. (On an Inscript keyboard, the Nukta is created by
typing the right bracket character, or “].”) The Nukta character helps to form
some of the lesser-used Sanskrit characters, or Urdu characters in Devanagari
transliteration, which are not directly available in your default keyboard.
23 Working With Indian Languages