Last night, I read about the new Nasteeq font available in Windows 8 and I just had to check it out. After leaving my machine up all night to install the consumer preview, I finally had time to examine the new “Urdu Typeset” out a while ago. Although Microsoft explicitly states it to be a ‘document’ font, it never hurts to check out how it behaves in a web UI setting. Here’s a screen shot of how the Twitter Urdu page would look with the font. I had to do some CSS overriding to get that right (body.ur for the curious).

Urdu Typesetting

While it does not look that bad, what bugs me is the fact that the English characters in the font are no way near good enough. The extra kerning for Urdu is probably to blame, but as it turns out, I haven’t been able to find a single Nastaleeq font which can render English as well as Urdu characters in such a way that they are legible enough when used in web pages. The nearest you can get is Alvi Nastaleeq v1.0.0 (screenshot below).

Alvi Nastaleeq v1.0.0

But even this font doesn’t quite give an elegant enough look which can be used in professional web pages. Until someone is ambitious enough to tackle this problem, we will probably wont see any useable Urdu+English interfaces. Any solution for us bilinguals will have to handle bidirectional (bidi) text as well. Meanwhile, an alternate is to either detect language and add spans with different fonts, or simply let go your desire to see Urdu Nastaleeq and switch to Helvetica.

Helvetica

Update: BBC has now embedded a new font (BBCNasim) on their website which is quite good. In fact I don’t use this plugin any more myself. It’s not Nastaleeq but it is good enough.

Let’s face it. The font on the BBC Urdu website is not that good. When a friend complained about it on our alumni list, I thought of writing a small greasemonkey script to take  care of the problem. The results are pretty good, as visible in the image below. The left part is the site after installing the Urdu Naskh Asia type font provided by BBC and before installing the script (and I maintain, Aijaz, it is not good). The right part is after installing the script. Click on the image and you’ll get an un-scaled version.

To install the script, click the link below and follow the installation instructions given there. Currently, it works only on Chrome and Firefox.

BBC Urdu Font Changer @ userscripts.org

and the world is a bit better now…

Is google (finally) stemming Urdu? The last time I checked, there were doing something like a transliteration based search but in the screenshot below, you can see that searching for the phrase ان پڑھ چٹا shows some stemming is being used. Does anyone know anything?  Oh, and while I’m on this topic, I would also like to know why is it called چٹا ان پڑھ ?

While all the online English to Urdu translators that I have seen don’t really work that well (read suck), if we make use the overlapping vocabulary and grammar of Hindi and Urdu along with using Google’s translation API, things come out pretty decent (as mentioned in my previous post). Here’s a small 15 min first cut script which just uses English to Hindi translation and then transliterates from Hindi to Urdu. Feel free to use the code and do ping me if you improve something. This works as a Hindi to Urdu transliterator as well.

How are you?
آپ کیسی ہیں؟

(Thanks to عزت مآب جناب آغا علی رضا قزلباش رحمتہ اللہ علیہ who graciously sent me his term report on Hindi to Urdu transliteration, from where I’ve copied (and modified) the character mapping.)

آلووں کو پکنے دو
آلووں کو چولہے کی
دھیمی دھیمی آنچوں کا
کچھ مزہ تو چکھنے دو
آلووں کو پکنے دو

تیز تپتے تیل سے
پانی کو پرے رکھنا
پاس نہ ذرا کرنا
ورنہ چلملاتی سی
گرم سی کئ چھینٹیں
تم پر اُڑ کر آئیں گی
خوب پھر جلائیں گی
اِس لیے میں ٹوکے ہوں
اِس جلن سے روکے ہوں
مجھ کو روک سکنے دو
آلووں کو پکنے دو

اب کچن میں پھیلے گی
آلووں کے پکنے کی
بھینی بھینی سی خوشبو
بھوک سینچنے والی
روح اینچنے والی
دل کو کھینچنے والی
وہ کمینی سی خوشبو

لوگ پھر یہ سوچیں گے
یہ کہاں سے آئی ہے
اور وہ تعاقب میں
تیرے پاس آئیں گے
تجھ کو یہ بتائیں گے
"جل گئے ہیں آلو"
جبکہ خود وہ جلتے ہیں
آلووں کی اِس ڈش کو
خود ہی حاصل کرنے کی
خواہشوں میں پلتے ہیں
اور ہاتھ مَلتے ہیں

ان تمام لوگوں کی
چکنی چپڑی باتوں پر
نہ دھیان تم دینا
ایک کان سے سننا
ان سنی پھر کر دینا
دل میں کینہ رکھتے ہیں
وہ تو صرف بَکتے ہیں
ان کو تم بھی بَکنے دو
آلووں کو پکنے دو