I forgot this excellent KACST font suite too, that seems to work now as a good Pan-Arabic font, for use with Arabic, Urda, and Qag: http://ceri.kacst.edu.sa/download/KacstArabicFonts-1.6.zip Many styles available, great for Quran texts...
----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Kirk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Antoine Leca" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "Unicode Mailing List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2004 2:19 PM Subject: Re: Urdu Unicode website [Was: Novice question] > On 25/03/2004 03:33, Antoine Leca wrote: > > > ... > > > >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. > > > > > > > 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. > > >>(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. > > > > > > > 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 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/ > >
