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Learn about the history and evolution of Urdu keyboard layouts for computers and typewriters. Find out how Urdu Zabta Takhti (UZT) and phonetic keyboards are standardized and used for Urdu language processing.
Learn about the history, script and letters of the Urdu alphabet, a modification of the Persian alphabet derived from the Arabic script. See examples of Nastaʿlīq, the dominant style of Urdu calligraphy, and compare it with other abjad scripts.
Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in South Asia, with 230 million speakers worldwide. It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, where it is also an official language alongside English, and has a Persianised register and a rich literary heritage.
Nastaliq is a calligraphic hand used for Persian, Urdu, Kashmiri and other languages written in Perso-Arabic script. Learn about its origin, development, characteristics and variations from this comprehensive article.
InPage is the only program that could produce Nastaʿlīq text until recently, and it doesn't use Unicode, so Urdu writers didn't bother with Unicode. Nowadays we have freely available Nastaʿlīq Unicode fonts, Nafees Nastaleeq, Jameel Noori Nastaleeq, Pak Nastaleeq, etc., but they don't come standard with Windows and have some problems.
InPage is a desktop publishing software by Concept Software Pvt. Ltd., an Indian company, for creating documents in Urdu and other languages using Nastaliq script. It was developed in 1994 and has a large ligature library and WYSIWYG display.
There is a dedicated national Centre of Excellence for Urdu Informatics that operates under the auspices of National Language Authority that has been carrying out research on the standardisation of Urdu alphabets for electronic media.
Note that Hindi–Urdu transliteration schemes can be used for Punjabi as well, for Gurmukhi (Eastern Punjabi) to Shahmukhi (Western Punjabi) conversion, since Shahmukhi is a superset of the Urdu alphabet (with 2 extra consonants) and the Gurmukhi script can be easily converted to the Devanagari script.