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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
by mchaver 12y ago
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 12y agoData 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 12y agoThe 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 12y agoYes, 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 12y agoOk, 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.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]