[XeTeX] The answer of Donald Ervin Knuth to my letter

[maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu]

> A while ago I wrote a letter to Donald Knuth... I recieved
> his answer today. I would like to share his answer with you
> so I just write it down:
> ...
>> (And incidentally, I have no good ideas about how to typeset
>> Farsi in the traditional Nastaliq style with maximum beauty!)

FWIW, we just produced the draft of a grammar of the morphology of Urdu
using XeLaTeX and the Nafees Nastaleeq font
(http://www.crulp.org/software/localization/Fonts/nafeesNastaleeq.html--
we had v1.01).  It looks awfully nice to us, but we're not good judges. 
We would be interested in hearing if there are better ways to typeset
Nastaliq using XeLaTeX.

We are also aware of Thomas Milo's work with Arabic scripts
(http://www.decotype.com/).  But his implementation of Nasta'liq is not
finished yet, afaik, and is in any case not compatible with Xe(La)TeX.

   Mike Maxwell
   CASL/ U MD