...There are Unicode Nastaliq fonts available, although not from Microsoft. See http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html#arabic; both of the links to fonts called nastaliq are currently broken, but one of them can be found at http://www.crulp.org/nafeesNastaleeq.html, see also http://www.crulp.org/Downloads/NafeesNastaleeq_Release_Notes.pdf. These are supposed to work with Windows, presumably with Uniscribe, but I don't know how well; there is a sample of in this PDF file. The Microsoft Urdu keyboard presumably produces the required characters.
As Peter correctly noted from day 1, all this stuff is not very important, since Urdu users really expect nastaleeq style, so either they are not using Urdu support, or they use proprietary solutions which extent remains to be explained by competent persons.
I disagree. There is no reason why these scripts cannot be displayed on Windows 9x with IE 5.5 and later, and suitable fonts, installed. See "Display" below.(and of course Windows 9x/ME which does not support easily
multiple layouts,
This is news to me. What it does not support easily are other scripts like Gurmukhi or Bengali, particularly on input ;-). Neither do the supplementary Arabic characters needed for Urdu, for instance. For this very reason, one of the first answers to the original question, made by Edward, correctly pointed out that testing on 9x or 16-bit boxes would be probably useless.
and where Tavulesoft Keyman is probably a good solution).
Tavultesoft (<URL:http://www.tavultesoft.com/keyman/>). I do not know the extent of it. I am not competent this about. Their home page does not seem to target specifically at the Urdu market, and historically they did not. So I have no clue about the real extent of this solution to type Urdu into IE/Gecko/Opera on 9x. I am not even sure it is really helpful (have to see with WM_UNICHAR support, as you probably know; Peter should be able to tell us if it works with IE; about Gecko, a quick search on mozilla.org returned no matches...). And of course if you have to type it first into Wordpad or Word then cut-and-paste, well surely Unipad is a better solution then... and definitively they are not operational.
Antoine
Here there seems to be confusion between two different issues, keyboarding and display. These are entirely separate issues when we consider browsers, except perhaps for search boxes.
1) Keyboarding: Microsoft keyboards for Urdu (and for any other language not supported by code pages) work only on Windows 2000/XP (and perhaps some versions of NT), not on 9x. Tavultesoft Keyman 5/6 Unicode keyboards, including the Urdu Unicode keyboard, work on 2000/XP, and also on 9x with a limited set of applications, including MS Word 97/2000/2002 with the special Wordlink add-in program (but Word 97 does not support RTL scripts). Tavultesoft does not support Urdu or any specific languages (except for Thai and Lao) itself, but provides a repository for keyboards produced by those who are presumed to be experts in the specific languages.
2) Display: In principle scripts like Urdu, whether Naskh or Nastaliq, display correctly on Windows 2000/XP, and also on 9x with the complex script display facilities installed with IE 5.5 and later. This display is supported in other programs, including other browsers, as long as IE is installed. Unicode is no problem for display with IE 5.5 and later even on 9x. In practice there may be some limitations in display of complex scripts, especially Nastaliq, on 9x because of the limitations of earlier versions of Uniscribe. And of course suitable fonts need to be installed, and do not necessarily come with the system.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
