[XeTeX] Nasta'liq fonts

[Jonathan Kew]

On 20 Feb 2008, at 6:47 pm, maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu wrote:

> Does anyone here have experience with Nasta'liq fonts?
>
> We're interested in typesetting some Urdu (one word to one sentence
> examples in a grammar written in English).  Urdu is usually written  
> with a
> Nasta'liq (aka Nastaleeq) version of the Perso-Arabic script.   
> There are
> just a few Nasta'liq fonts around, including the Nafees Nasta'liq font
> (from CRULP, see
> http://www.crulp.org/software/localization/Fonts/ 
> nafeesNastaleeq.html) and
> the Pak Nastaleeq font (from the Center of Excellence for Urdu
> Informatics, available at
> http://openfontlibrary.org/media/files/zahoor/211).
>
> There is a little discussion of these fonts at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nastaleeq, mostly to the effect that the
> Nafees font is "slow".  That doesn't matter to us in the context of
> producing PDFs etc.  But I understand that there are other problems  
> with
> at least the Nafees font, particularly with the rendering of  
> diacritics.
> While some of the vowel diacritics are commonly omitted in Urdu  
> texts, for
> purposes of a grammar we might want to include them, so this is an  
> issue.
>
> Can anyone comment on the suitability and drawbacks of these two  
> fonts (or
> other Nasta'liq fonts)?  We are interested in using them with XeTeX to
> produce PDFs, although at this point MsWord might be an alternative to
> XeTeX (in both cases, we're starting from XML DocBook files).

There is also a font called IranNastaliq (with a more Persian style)  
available from an Iranian government site somewhere, but I don't have  
the details handy.

My experience trying these fonts with XeTeX has been rather mixed;  
there seem to be some limitations in the ICU OpenType support, so  
often the glyph positioning doesn't fully work. The best results I've  
seen so far have come with Monotype's OpenType version of Noori  
Nastaliq, but this is a commercial font rather than freely available.

It's also possible that future updates to the OpenType support in  
XeTeX will improve things....

JK