
The Death of the Urdu Script  - aarghh
https://medium.com/@eteraz/the-death-of-the-urdu-script-9ce935435d90
======
616c
So I skimmed the article once, then read it again.

I see the writer is here. I just want to say I understand your sentiment, but
your title and content are filled with some annoying misinformation and
discrepancies.

First of all, Nastaliq is not "the Urdu script". If you even skimmed
Wikipedia, you would notice that the script does come oringinally from Arabic
(where it is used, but more to your point, sadly not as much in print media,
at least from my experience in the GCC) and was later well loved by the
Persians, and later different portions of the Indian subcontinent (India,
Pakistan, and beyond). To call it Urdu script, just because it is popular, and
to insinuate that it Naksh is the default script of Arabic (it is not the
preferred one, by the way) is a huge stretch.

Another point: Naksh was invented by a Persian, but who grew up his whole life
in Arab Baghdad and was an Abbasid court vizier in modern-day Iraq. He did not
spend time in Iran (then Fars, as it is known today in Arabic), until he was a
tax collector there after growing up in Iraq, and only for a period. He might
have been ethnically Persian, but to call Naksh script Persian because of the
guys family background is far-fetched, especially if you know how loose the
cultural boundaries between Abbasid Iran-Iraq were (they were part of the
empire and people, goods, and ideas freely flowed between them). It is a
derivative of Kufic script, and has strong ties to the religious intellectual
history of Iraq (Basra and Kufa were the seat of a massive amount of religious
scholarship and still prominent beliefs in Islam; scripts and art were an
awesome by-product).

Sorry for the rant, but I know this is probably not your field. As I guy who
spent a lot of time studying Arabic and Arab and/or Islamichistory, I get very
annoyed at the misinformation peddled by people about Arabic history and
culture. I do not mean to be so blunt, but I hear people rattle off
misinformation like this often, and it irritates me.

~~~
alieteraz
You are correct about the history. Unfortunately the Abbasid empire came to an
end in 1258 AD and Urdu wasn't even around then.

I take your point that naskh has been wide-spread. And it is true that it is
even in the Indian sub-continent. Sindhi, for example, is a naskh based
language. Punjabi, which my parents spoke, on the other hand, prefers
nastaliq, and regionally the two places are adjacet. That doesn't mean that
those people didn't historically play around with scripts. They did.

However, my piece is entirely about what is going on today. Sure you can find
Ottoman era signs in Egypt and the Levant that display Arabic in nastasliq (my
readers sent me plenty such pictures), but by and large Arabic today is
written in naskh and almost never in nastaliq. Take a look at some of the
fonts that the Omani government is playing around with. They are not nastaliq.
This is the political aspect I briefly touched upon in the article. I hope you
will get a chance to look into the Arabization aspects of the political
debates raging in that part of the world. I make brief mention of it by
bringing up the fight over "Khuda Hafiz" or "Allah Hafiz."

Meanwhile, the past two or three generations of Urdu readers and writers grew
up associating nastaliq and Urdu almost exclusively with each other (thus the
jarring effect associated with having to read Urdu in something else). I have
plenty of emails testifying to this from people from my parents generation and
some people of mine.

In short, no one is really talking about ancient Arab history here, as
fascinating as that would be.

~~~
sharjeel
> Sindhi, for example, is a naskh based language. Punjabi, which my parents
> spoke, on the other hand, prefers nastaliq, and regionally the two places
> are adjacet.

Saying that Sindhi is Naskh based language while Punjabi is Nastaleeq based
language is like saying English is Arial based language while French is Times
New Roman based.

~~~
eshvk
This is rather confusing. IIRC both Arial and Times New Roman let you express
all 26 alphabets. Now if Naskh has Nastaleeq have differing number of
characters, is this a mere font issue or is there something more fundamental
differing between the two?

~~~
triangleman
restalis, FYI you have been hellbanned, so no one can read your posts unless
they are logged in and have "showdead" turned on.

~~~
restalis
I think it's because I've touched political matters in a post a while ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5166069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5166069)

------
alieteraz
This is Ali Eteraz. Thank you for recognizing this piece. It was a lot of fun
to write. I've actually been to a Ycombinator event. Twice I think. A couple
of your alumnus managed to talk me into downloading stuff or getting on email
lists that, well, I didn't always use (though they did seem promising!). I am
a writer based in the Bay Area and I really enjoy getting to learn about
interesting technological developments and human stories within that. So
definitely hit me up whenever you're congregating or plotting something
interesting. My website is alieteraz.com or I am at @eteraz or FB.

Ali Eteraz

ps - I later got to meet Michael K. at the Unicode conference in Santa Clara,
along with the Microsoft Windows team. The Windows Phone people, who I also
really wanted to talk to because this is a mobile problem too, did not want to
talk to me because they had a new phone coming out.

------
abdullahkhalids
There is another problem with fonts. Popular fonts used on the internet only
have information about the joining of the 28 Arabic characters. When the extra
characters in Urdu are typed they don't join with the other characters in the
word. eg. I will type the first line of the couplet here. Note how the
third,fourth and seventh word are broken up. اور باذار سے لے آے اگر ٹوٹ گیا

I have written about some other issues with the Urdu language over here.
[http://upgoerurdu.nfshost.com/technical.html](http://upgoerurdu.nfshost.com/technical.html)

------
ximeng
Unsurprising to see a link to Michael Kaplan in there. His blog was taken down
due to what sounds like a dispute over patents with his boss. See this twitter
conversation between Spolsky and him:
[https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/447024470256283648](https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/447024470256283648).

\--

"It has been made officially clear to me that [my] Blog ... is for all intents
and purposes _dead_."

Well, I blogged about a patent and included art, so my former manager took the
Blog down with extreme prejudice.

\--

Blog is now archived at [http://www.siao2.com/](http://www.siao2.com/) and has
much more information on localisation.

~~~
thejdude
Wat? I thought the whole _point_ of patents is to make information public,
because competitors are simply not _allowed_ to use the information without
payment anyway.

------
jey
> Utility had defeated tradition.

Is that supposed to be self-evidently bad?

~~~
Yardlink
Sadly popular opinion seems to be that languages and other traditions must be
preserved because, well, we can't lose them. It's certainly good to preserve
them in museums so people can use them for research, etc. But there's little
or no actual need for more than one language in the world, let along more than
one writing system for the same language!

People don't mourn the loss of codepage 437. For many people that's a big part
of their growing up. But now it's not in common use and the world is better
for it. We don't see people trying to slow the adoption of UTF8 because it's
making the world one big dull homogenous borg that's unable to express box
drawings.

Nowadays, there's quiet revolution going on in the form of many small dialects
disappearing. That's wonderful. It's giving millions the opportunities that
come with being able to communicate with more other people by sharing common
language. We should be celebrating the massive advantages that keep growing
each time another obscure script or dialect becomes nobody's native language.

~~~
Dewie
I detest this view. Typical navel gazing, utility-uber-alles (at least for
things that "I" am not interested in) programmer who is more concerned with
some kind of compatibility (of course using IT examples) than anything else.

Even if we only strictly consider languages themselves, what if some people
find pleasure in them? You can't say that what they enjoy doing is wrong with
some argument for its utility - because the use and consumption of that
language is a utility in itself. Neither can you confine them to these
"museums" since they might want to use it outside of the halls of dusty books.
Then, so much for "one and only one language".

Now, considering not just the language but culture. Languages are so
incredibly context dependent and vague that I think they are deeply
intertwined with culture. Outside of whatever you can laboriously define and
enshrine in some book to stuff in a museum, there are incredible nuances that
can be hard to appreciate if one is not involved with it, through things like
social interaction and the written word. If you lose or discard the language
of some culture, then you might also lose an appreciation for a lot of
subtleties and ways of thinking. Words and expressions that might seemingly
translate easily may have nuances that only an active speaker of the language
can appreciate.

Thirdly. Consider if we with one magical button could make everyone in the
world speak one language, say English. Now we are all on the same page! Then
fast forward a few units of time - are we still speaking the same language?
Probably, but we might have developed distinct dialects in different corners
of the world. Why? Because every society and culture practising the language
"evolved", namely added new expressions, words, phrases. Even pronunciation
(accents). Why didn't the language simply evolve in the same way, worldwide?
Of course because of the fact that the world is made up of a lot of different
places and cultures. All of these cultures affect each other, but it's like a
web of intermingling sharing. There is, largely, not a single, dominating
culture, and so there is no central "authority" on how the language is going
to evolve naturally. But you _need_ a single "reference" point for this
language to evolve in a uniform way, and avoid a lot of dialects! So if the
goal is to have a single language, and a single dialect, your only bet is
cultural imperialism. But culture is just a silly thing that just gets in the
way, right? Better just stuff them in a museum and adopt a single,
standardized culture. It's so efficient!

Given enough time, these dialects might turn into their own languages (let's
say that languages are now distinguished by not being mutually intelligible
with each other). Then you're back to the same problem, basically. Well, it's
a lot better since all of these languages are closely related. And maybe these
languages would never really become their own languages, since there is
sufficient inter-cultural, global communication to avoid any significant
divergence. But to eventually have no dialecs, no linguistic
misunderstandings? Something's gotta give, namely everyone has to adopt the
same culture and pallet of beliefs and values. But I guess that kind of
robotic efficiency would be a Utopia for you.

~~~
Yardlink
Why preserve culture? You answer still comes down to "because we can't lose
it". The other side of the coin is it's being done at the expense of forcing
all minority language speakers to be economically disadvantaged. Great news if
you're an American, not so great if you're a Nepalese. I have to disagree with
you there. You haven't shown any reason why a member of a minority culture
should be excluded from most of society and prevented from even learning
modern knowledge, reading literature, or even understanding the ways of
thinking of most of the world.

This is why I favor storing languages in museums, rather than burdening
millions of innocent people with the job they didn't even sign up for.

~~~
Dewie
> Why preserve culture? You answer still comes down to "because we can't lose
> it".

Why have cultures? Because it increases the diversity of thought and ideas.
This diversity in turn can inspire each other and create new impulses, ideas,
ways of thinking. This diversity is severely limited - and in turn how much it
can influence and inspire other cultures - if they simply disappear. It's like
taking all the work and time it took, for perhaps thousands of years, to
create that culture, and simply destroying it.

Another reason is that I think that it's a shame for majority, dominant
cultures to simply swallow up minority cultures. If the people of that
minority culture want to preserve it, I think they should stand a chance.

Lastly, I think it's a worthy end onto itself. This is the end-road of
socratic reasoning. Would you say that it is frivolous to just say "because it
is worthy in itself"? Well, this is how all arguments end up, anyway. Just
like your argument might end up with the assumption that "convenience and less
struggle to communicate is worthy in itself". But then I can say, "a little
struggle and inconvenience in communication is part of the fun! We should
preserve our differences for that reason".

> The other side of the coin is it's being done at the expense of forcing all
> minority language speakers to be economically disadvantaged. Great news if
> you're an American, not so great if you're a Nepalese. I have to disagree
> with you there. You haven't shown any reason why a member of a minority
> culture should be excluded from most of society and prevented from even
> learning modern knowledge, reading literature, or even understanding the
> ways of thinking of most of the world.

Nonsense. Do you know how many people speak two, three and so on languages?
How many people who speak a minority language in some country, also speak some
majority language? The same goes for speaking a native, minority, or whatever
language, and speaking English (or perhaps French or Portuguese etc.,
depending on where they are in the world).

I have to emphasize that I would never condone _forcing_ people to practice
and learn a language. It should be by their own volition. If they don't want
to practice it, then that is of course entirely up to them. Just as I wouldn't
force them or encourage them to give up their language (and perhaps in turn
also their culture) in favour of some international standard language.

> This is why I favor storing languages in museums, rather than burdening
> millions of innocent people with the job they didn't even sign up for.

Is that so.

------
wirrbel
its an interesting read and I acknowledge the intent to keep the traditional
and authentic writing system for Urdu.

I have a few thoughts on this though. One would be the legibility. Of course I
cannot judge legibility of writing systems I do not like, but it seems that
nastaliq would be hardly readable on a lot of mobile devices and I wonder how
difficult learning the ornate script is. I am talking about alphabetization
here.

Next thing is: I am learning turkish and turkish is written in the roman
alphabet. As far as I know, it was written in a arabic/persian script before
which was then reformed to use the latin alphabet. As far as I can tell this
is today really uncontroversial and using the latin alphabet is actually the
more suitable alphabet for turkish and its rich vowel system that is really
important for grammar and meaning. Again I cannot really say anything for
Urdu, but knowing it is not arabic but afaik a language of the indo-european
family I wonder if there are more reasons to use the lating alphabet than just
availability of nataliq fonts and rendering engines.

As a side note I would add a few observations relating to the
cultural/heritage aspects. In Germany, the "Fraktur" was used widely even at
the beginning of the 20th century (see
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur)
). Some authors, like Hermann Hesse refused that Antiqua fonts would be used
for their writings until publishers convinced them that their works could just
not be read by young folks. In a way, a lot of people argued against using
non-gothic fonts, but in the end antiqua became quite standard. Nowadays we
use the lating alphabet (and most people are not concious about that there
ever was a switch).

~~~
m_mueller
A note about Fraktur: Even though the wiki article states that the main reason
for its downfall was the Nazis forbidding it themselves, as a native German
speaker I quite strongly feel it to be associated with Nazi culture - which
immediately renders it impossible to use in any context, since you want to be
as far from that as you can. Allergic reaction to anything resembling Nazi
symbolism is quite strong in German speaking culture, even in Switzerland
where it never took hold. So it seems to me that postmodernist culture is most
responsible for the sudden downfall of that scripture.

~~~
hibbelig
I associate Fraktur with Karl May :-) (He died 1912, so he predated the
Nazis.)

------
alieteraz
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if Apple and Android make a nastaliq font
part of the directory of fonts that go into their devices from the get go,
there wouldn't be a problem.

Such fonts have already been designed. The issue now is to find Android and
iOS developers who can make them default in the operating systems.

When I talked to Microsoft they said that on the smaller devices every last
bit of memory was precious so they didn't want to stick extra megabytes or
however big a font is. I think that Apple's cheapening out is worse than
Android's, because at least Android offers the entire Urdu alphabet (though in
naskh). Apple doesn't even offer the Urdu alphabet, requiring Urdu users to
have to make do with 12 less letters.

~~~
paperwork
I don't think it is just a matter of adding a font, with 12 additional letter
for urdu. The actual layout algorithm has to change (how characters are laid
out, their size, how beginning of one connects to ending of another, etc.).

------
gioele
Meanwhile, in the free software world...

[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ySTZaXP5XKFg0OpmHZM0...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ySTZaXP5XKFg0OpmHZM00v5b17GSr3ojnzJekl4U8qI/view#slide=id.g177a94b_0_60)

[https://github.com/behdad/harfbuzz/blob/master/test/shaping/...](https://github.com/behdad/harfbuzz/blob/master/test/shaping/texts/in-
tree/shaper-arabic/script-arabic/language-urdu/crulp/ligatures/README)

(Harfbuzz is the default text layout engine for Linux GUI frameworks: Qt, GTK,
etc)

~~~
abdullahkhalids
This talk at Google by Roozbeh Pournader is very good at laying out the issues
with bidirectional language issues in software. This is a non-trivial problem
and is rarely ever solved correctly.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOEzYefrqo4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOEzYefrqo4)

~~~
616c
And not so ironically, Behdad Esfahbod, one of the original developers of
HarfBuzz, works for Google now, according to his blurb on Github.

[https://github.com/behdad](https://github.com/behdad)

I actually emailed him a few times before I discovered mlterm to read Arabic
and other RTL fonts in a terminal (you might ask why: file names and I use
mutt for email). Very nice guy, and I am very appreciative of this library.

------
scrollaway
That was an amazing article, and a great insight into middle eastern scripts
in the digital world.

It doesn't look like it'll get out of the new queue, but I wanted to thank OP
for sharing it anyway.

~~~
contingencies
Pro tip: Mughul India is not the Middle East, and neither is Pakistan or Iran.

There are arabic derived scripts at least as far east as China and the
Philippines ( _jawi_ ), but describing them as Middle Eastern is plain wrong -
just as you would not describe Balinese or Cambodian as Indus Valley.

~~~
scrollaway
The article talks about two arabic scripts. Saying "Middle eastern" is more
inclusive than saying "arabic" and while it does not include pakistan, it does
almost reach it. Kind of like when we talk about Europe and increase the reach
a bit more. Or when you say "the United States" when you really mean north
america (a much worse offender since you talk about a country). This was my
logic when writing it.

I'm not a history expert. I would love a history lesson but you seem like a
very poor teacher, "picking" on people who just try to be nice. I did not know
this article was going to be on the frontpage as I said in my original comment
- I caught it at 2 points. Had I known my comment was going to go through a
seven-way review by a wide variety of experts, I'd have just said "non-latin
scripts" to be on the safe side. (/s)

Sorry for the rant - People correcting each others _where correction does not
at all matter_ bothers me to no end. It feels like a sneaky and thoroughly
annoying way of flashing your "I know THINGS!" credentials.

~~~
contingencies
You seem to be admitting mistake, complaining about being corrected, and
dismissing the process all at once. But I'm sure you learned something :)

------
gauravk
Sad. I remember as a kid, growing up in Kashmir, I took special pride in my
Urdu calligraphy skills. Writing each sentence was like an art project.

------
alieteraz
BTW. I published this piece in fall of last year. Long before it came on
Hacker News, it had been passed around the Pakistani and Indian Twittersphere,
and no one there was saying that we should let tech companies off the hook for
not offering a) the full alphabet and b) the right script. It was, actually,
the Pakistanis and Indians that made this article what it was. When I wrote
it, I honestly thought I was just some eccentric who was annoyed for very
personal reasons. Even as we speak the piece is being retweeted by professors
and students at LUMS, in Lahore, and universities in Islamabad.

What's even more interesting is that as a result of writing this piece my own
favoritism towards nastaliq actually LESSENED. But by the time my thinking
evolved, the nastaliq purists had made the piece their own.

------
elandybarr
The article is great, but I don't think it adequately captures one of the
difficulties with this problem, and that is the very high minimum number of
characters that must be designed for an Urdu font. I think it is an order of
magnitude higher than many would guess it at first.

~~~
jpatokal
The Wikipedia article on Nastaliq puts the number at around 20,000.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasta%CA%BFl%C4%ABq_script](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasta%CA%BFl%C4%ABq_script)

------
sharjeel
This article was making rounds in my social feed about a year ago. Disturbed
by the extremely weak and some absolutely flawed arguments, I wrote a note:
[https://www.facebook.com/sharjeelqureshi/posts/1015180699836...](https://www.facebook.com/sharjeelqureshi/posts/10151806998363551)

------
616c
And for the Arch Linux peopkle, have a Nastaliq font if you need it (or want
it).

[https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-
nastaliq/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-nastaliq/)

------
Ghalib5423
In the 1960s, the Government of Pakistan tried to make naskh common in order
to facilitate mechanization of printing. In order to do so, naskh was
introduced in schools so that children get used to it from an early age. Some
books started appearing in naskh. The daily newspaper Nawa-i-waqt started
printing its second page in naskh. It was very unfortunate for Urdu that these
efforts failed. The reason was simple. Instead of requiring that the textbooks
be typeset in naskh, they continued to be handwritten, albeit in naskh-like
script. Gradually after a few years that naskh started resembling nasta’aliq
more and more and eventually all traces of naskh disappeared. This, to mind,
was the greatest setback suffered by the Urdu language printing.

Let me explain why I call it the greatest setback. Urdu books and newspapers
were written by hand and then lithographed. The process was slow, mistakes
were plentiful, dots above and below letters were misplaced, letters such as
daal and waaw were indistinct from each other, and many times the printing was
illegible. Please try to read a book produced by that method, and then compare
it to the same book typeset in naskh; you will note the difference. I have a
copy of Divan-e-Hafiz published in nasta’aliq in the subcontinent, and another
copy in naskh published in Iran. The difference in the clarity of text in the
two is phenomenal.

This abortive attempt in 1960s to switch to naskh had nothing to do with
religion or Arabization. Ayub Khan, in whose time the effort started, can
hardly be accused of religion-inspired initiatives. It was simply to promote
mechanized printing. If anything, later the religion-enthusiast Zia-ul-Haq did
nothing to popularize naskh. Ironically, computer has saved nasta’aliq, since
software is now commonly available which is now universally used to compose
material for printing. But naskh is still clearer to read, and in my opinion
it is not too late to give it another try, and use naskh, while reserving
nasta’aliq for calligraphy. Undoubtedly nasta’aliq is elegant and no script
can match its beauty.

------
kranner
For Hindi speakers who don't read Nastaliq, the sign on the wall is hilarious.
Transliterated to Devanagari, it reads:

हाय मैं मर गई ऐन्ना (इतना) टेस्टी बर्गर

------
sandGorgon
@alieteraz - your comments below have been extremely informative and though
urdu occupies the collective conscious of all Indians through bollywood (90%
of melancholic melodies are invariably in urdu), we have never given the
script much thought.

I think you fought admirably with Apple, Twitter and Microsoft for getting
Urdu fonts included ... but that is the wrong battleground.

The arena for you is simply the browser and mobile . All you need to do is get
Nastaliq scripts adopted into Google Webfonts (free for anybody to use in
their webapps) and into Android (installing a font through a Launcher theme is
incredibly easy [1]. Do NOT try getting it included in the Android base)

do you think you can get together a Kickstarter to fund a nastaliq font, good
enough to be usable ? and then try getting them into webfonts and android
themes ?

[1]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pete.app.apext...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pete.app.apexthemes.font.chokycooky&hl=en)
and [http://appcrawlr.com/android-apps/best-apps-launcher-
fonts](http://appcrawlr.com/android-apps/best-apps-launcher-fonts)

------
mchaver
For web development, perhaps you could create a simple system that detects if
the user's device supports nastaliq. If not convert, it to naskh or Romanized
Urdu (not sure which is preferred). As for dealing with all the data already
written in naskh and Romanized Urdu, this is a bit more complicated because I
am guessing there is not a one to one match between naskh and nastaliq (naskh
has less letters), and Romanized Urdu and nastaliq. You would probably need to
collect some data and use some machine learning techniques. If it is not too
big you could use a client-side Javascript program, otherwise something like a
Chrome extension or an API. There are similar things done for Arabic to handle
various forms of Romanized Arabic (user does not have access to an Arabic
keyboard) and Non-Modern Standard Arabic Dialects:
[http://www.yamli.com/](http://www.yamli.com/)

~~~
abdullahkhalids
Data is stored as Unicode (except some really old desktop app formats that
were written before Unicode). Naskh and Nastaliq are font styles, used when
the system displays the data. The solution is simply that good Nastaliq fonts
be created and then used on websites where Urdu is being used. Since Urdu
fonts can be much larger in size than Roman fonts (the fonts have to specify
joining behavior between all possible combination of characters), delivering
over the web is not really viable. Fonts have to be native to all the OSes in
existence, so that websites can use them.

(I don't think Roman Urdu is ever used for anything serious.)

~~~
mchaver
The author of the article mentions that Naskh does not contain all the letters
that Nastaliq has, so if someone types an Urdu text in Naskh it would not have
the same underlying Unicode if they had typed it in Nastaliq. Correct me if
this is wrong.

My assumption is that not all OSes will adopt Nastaliq simultaneously. So
assume that the website is storing data in complete coding for Nastaliq and
they want to send it to a device that cannot render Nastaliq so the Unicode
should be converted so it is properly renderable in Naskh.

The other half is just to make one's Urdu language web experience completely
in Nastaliq. Even unimportant stuff written in Roman Urdu and then converted
to Nastaliq might help promote the use of Nastaliq.

~~~
jpatokal
Yes, that's wrong. The author was talking about that fact that Urdu has more
letters than standard _Arabic_ , mostly additional diacritics etc, which makes
entering it with an Arabic keypad/keyboard painful.

Both Naskh and Nastaliq can be encoded using the Arabic block in Unicode, it's
just that Nastaliq's vertically stacking nature makes it difficult to deal
with in computer systems that expect clean rows of text.

~~~
mchaver
Ok, I went back over and I did misread that part of the article. The problem
is not as complicated as I thought, but that vertical stacking is definitely a
challenging problem to handle.

------
paperwork
A big reason nastaliq is not widely available on our screens is because
rendering it correctly requires 'context sensitive shape substitution'[1].
Simple substitution of one character for another is not enough.

I've spent a couple of hours looking at how to render my own text, perhaps
using something like
[http://typeface.neocracy.org/](http://typeface.neocracy.org/), but my day to
day work is so far from text layout, rendering, client side javascript that it
would be (too) large an undertaking.

[1]
[http://ww.cle.org.pk/Publication/papers/2006/context_sensiti...](http://ww.cle.org.pk/Publication/papers/2006/context_sensitive_shape_substitution.pdf)
[PDF]

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thret
This feels like unusual timing. I am presently reading 'A Suitable Boy' by
Vikram Seth. One of the main characters is sent into virtual exile where he
learns how to read and write Urdu. Until now I don't think I'd heard of it.

My own opinion is that we should preserve history, remember it, but not morn
it. We are programmers! How many writing styles and languages have we seen die
to make way for something better (or worse?). This is a natural survival of
the fittest cycle that effects writing styles, languages, civilisations and
everything else. I have Japanese friends who read even less Kanji than I do. I
see that writing style dying out over the next 50 years also.

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Rapzid
I don't like how the article opens with the premise of a people struggling
their whole lives to master writing in a particular style only to have their
expression oppressed, then proceeds to talk about font rendering..

Generally though, I'm not really sure how I feel about trying to get people to
care about something so precious in general. One one hand it's a shame to lose
culture. On the other the internet/technology has its own culture and is it
really lost in the age of 5c per GB storage?

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wmil
It seems like something analogous has happened with European scripts. There
were huge changes in how characters were presented between different styles of
handwriting, engraving, printing presses, and finally everything the computer
world has brought us.

It just seems like the author has an extreme emotional attachment to a
typeface.

~~~
paperwork
I don't know about the author's state of mind, but generally speaking, this is
not just a matter of preference. For those of us who grew up reading Nastaliq,
other type faces such as naksh are fairly difficult to read 'fluently.'
Imagine if all books, newspapers websites were hand written by someone with
poor handwriting. It would actually slow down your reading speed. Reading is
such a natural thing we do on a daily basis that we notice even small things
which cause us to slow down.

btw, I use 'bad handwriting' simply as a way to explain the effect of
different writing style on reading, naksh is not good or bad -- it is just
different from what Urdu readers are used to.

Also, nastaliq isn't just different because its letters are formed differently
(there being a one-to-one correspondence between different typefaces).
Nastaliq letters are laid out in a context sensitive manner where a letter can
take on a fairly large number of shapes, depending on where in the word it is
(and which letter it is next to). My earlier post links to a paper which
describes how Nataliq rendering requires context sensitive shapes. Basically
randomly capitalize letters in everything you read online. Eventually you will
get used to it, but that doesn't mean it won't be annoying for a long time.

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m0th87
That's not the only way in which Urdu is "dying" \- due to colonization,
basically all modern words are in English.

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merrua
Nastaliq is lovely to look at.

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capex
Anyone ready to work with me on creating a Nastaliq webfont?

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GhotiFish
>Utility had defeated tradition.

There is hope for humanity yet!

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mellisarob
you need to come up with more details and authentic details because some stuff
you mentioned it utter crap.

