We tend to think of text as a means to an end, that the characters depicted are there only to convey meaning. In some ways, this emphasis on the form of writing a language runs contrary to conventional wisdom. Nastaʿlīq characters, per one observation, appear to “swing from the upper right to the lower left of each word as if suspended by an imaginary line.”
![good urdu fonts good urdu fonts](https://www.brandsynario.com/wp-content/uploads/Urdu.jpg)
Mir Ali of Tabriz, a 14th-century Persian calligrapher known as the father of the script, is said to have developed it after a dream in which Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, instructed him to draw letters that looked like “the wings of flying geese.” Squint at an Urdu verse in nastaʿlīq, and it might very well begin to resemble a flock of birds taking flight, or a branch in bloom.
![good urdu fonts good urdu fonts](https://image.shutterstock.com/image-vector/pakistan-written-urdu-language-vector-260nw-1789668041.jpg)
In the subcontinent, it was the script that disseminated the Quran, considered the word of God. When Urdu calligraphers speak of nastaʿlīq, it is with deep reverence.
![good urdu fonts good urdu fonts](https://tubehut.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/download-free-urdu-fonts.jpg)
“And every language, when it is written, shines when using the typeface which it truly presented in the world.”Ī traditional calligrapher writes in Urdu at a market in India. “The only hurdle for us is to bring the typeface that truly represent the language,” wrote Azeemi. His open letter, addressed to Cook and Apple’s chief design officer at the time, Jonathan Ive, described the need for a nastaʿlīq font on iOS platforms. In Azeemi’s eyes, the solution was now pretty straightforward: operating systems - Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others - had to be persuaded to adopt nastaʿlīq. In 2013, Apple introduced an Urdu keyboard for iOS devices, but, much to the chagrin of Urdu users, the default font was still naskh, the Arabic font. These early attempts at yanking Urdu on to the internet hadn’t been particularly profitable - Azeemi says he lost over $50,000 in the process. One of the earliest apps Azeemi developed, even before the keyboard, was for nursery rhymes in Urdu. Watching his children learn English through songs on YouTube, he’d felt a pang of loss - the anxiety that they might never speak or appreciate Urdu the way he does. He didn’t give much thought to Urdu’s digital future until he moved to California and became a father.
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As a teenager during the days of dial-up, he once racked up an internet bill that cost half of his father’s monthly salary in his early 20s, he learned to code on one of those old calculator-sized computers called palmtops.
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To communicate in Urdu, you either had to type in naskh or spell words phonetically in Latin script.Īzeemi, a software developer now working and living in Silicon Valley, grew up in Pakistan’s sprawling seaside city, Karachi. When Azeemi sat down to write his letter to Cook, nastaʿlīq was almost nowhere to be found online. But while Arabic is written in a script called naskh, simpler and more linear in its appearance, many other people - including Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, Urdu-speakers in India, and Uighur-speakers in parts of China - employ an ornate style of writing that originated in 14th-century Persia called nastaʿlīq. Spoken by nearly 170 million people in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, Urdu is written in an alphabet derived from Arabic.
![good urdu fonts good urdu fonts](https://i.imgur.com/Fxm49ew.png)
“Urdu language’s beauty lies in the typeface.” But even with an Urdu-language keyboard, the characters appeared on the screen in an entirely different font. In 2010, the now 42-year-old Pakistani-American developed a keyboard app you could use on iOS devices within two years, it had been downloaded over 165,000 times. By the time Mudassir Azeemi wrote to Apple CEO Tim Cook in 2014, he’d tried everything he could think of to make it easier to type in his native language, Urdu.