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For decades, it was nearly impossible to type in Urdu. Some are working to bring the script into a digital future.

If you were to walk down a street in New York City, you might encounter hundreds of fonts on a single block: everything from street signs to shop names take on distinct personalities. Urdu and its nastaʿlīq typeface, lagging in the digital space, are much more difficult to iterate on with existing technology. Where there are hundreds of thousands of Latin digital fonts — fonts so iconic that we know them by name, like Helvetica or Times New Roman — digital Urdu fonts are limited to a handful at most. The nastaʿlīq typography that you might see on the streets of Pakistan is most likely to be hand painted.

“We went on Google and typed “what are fonts, how do we develop them,” Zeeshan recalled. “We purchased software but sat on it for a long time because we didn’t know how to use it.” Produced in collaboration with a government technology board over the course of a decade, Mehr Nastaliq uses 500 characters, all handwritten by Nasrullah — a tiny fraction of the 20,000 glyphs Jamil so painstakingly wrote in the 1980s. The Mehrs are particularly proud of how light their font is: at 60 KB, it doesn’t slow down websites and renders quickly. You can elongate letters and add diacritics.

Their experience of developing Mehr Nastaliq drove home an important lesson: the need for close collaboration between the calligrapher and developer. “It is imperative that the calligrapher and developer understand each other,” emphasised Zeeshan. “Abbu understands programming too now, so he can offer a different solution when confronted with tech limitations.” Working with his parent comes with its own challenges, of course. “Sometimes, Zeeshan would say, This letter isn’t looking nice,” Nasrullah said with a chuckle. “And I’d get huffy and say, Are you the calligrapher?”

Unicode, developed in the early 1990s, is now a global standard for representing characters across language systems in computing code, which means if you write Urdu — in naskh or nastaʿlīq — on one computer, it won’t appear as a string of garbled symbols in another. But technological advances don’t automatically bode well for the digitization of non-Latin type languages. Nemeth notes that the proliferation of easy-to-use design software doesn’t eliminate the need for script-specific expertise. “Designers who are not willing or able to invest the years of learning and research necessary to master a foreign script,” he says, “are led to believe that their tools and some superficial ‘borrowing’ of design elements are sufficient for successful design.”

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#linguistics #typography #urdu #fonts #typefaces #type #typesetting #unicode #naskh #nastaliq #nasta'liq #rest of world #technology #language tech #internet linguistics #language on the interwebz

"So what about the Americans? We got anyone representing them?" "They're still post-apocalyptic apparently, the last recon mission said there's still to much weird shit going on to push their luck." "What about everyone else?" "Canada and Mexico have built walls, and I believe Alaska is now independent."

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Exclusion is often experienced less as targeted or directly aggressive comments, but by the overrepresentation of majority views and the sidelining of others. Dominant-caste men often crowd the space with discussions that exclude people with different experiences. For example, Moulee, a gay activist from the Bahujan community in southern India, said that the ongoing conversation about marriage equality feels like a privileged one, since marginalized groups are still struggling for more basic rights like education, “and queerness is not the only reason why access to education has been denied.” Ruth Chawngthu, a bisexual tribal woman from India’s northeast, said she’s left most of the online queer spaces, including Harmless Social Distancing, because they didn’t represent her concerns. “I don’t want to be a part of them anymore,” she said. Admins say that groups are apolitical, but in practice what that means is they get to choose what political means.

Ankur Paliwal, ‘Why minorities are abandoning India’s trailblazing queer forums’, Rest of World