Nastaleeq : beauty of Urdu

The style of writing that you see in the above painting is called "nastaleeq". Early on Urdu adopted this form of writing, and now it is considered inseparable from the Urdu language. Nastaleeq is highly stylized writing form, developed from Naskh ( Arabic is written in Naskh form).

Nastaliq is the innocent melody created by the fingertips of the one who is in love with God.

you can read history of Nastaleeq on this site.

http://www.kelk.org/History/history.shtml

With the advent of typewriter and computers it became difficult to transfer the elegance and beauty of nastaleeq on paper and screen, while typewriter adopted Naskh form of writing which was largely ignored by the Urdu readers since for them it looked very ugly, computers was a different story. Ahmed Mirza Jameel, a Pakistani artist transferred Urdu calligraphy using a ligature based system, this method was incorporated in creating Urdu desktop publishing software called InPage.

InPage is created by an Indian software company called Concept Sofware ( www.inpage.ws) . InPage has revolutionized the way Urdu newspapers and magazines are published now, and almost all of them have moved to composing on computers.

Internet posed a difficult challange for Urdu computing which still remains to be fully solved but fortunately we are much closer to it today. Unicode standard has made computers understand almost all the written languages of the world including Urdu. The problem remaines of designing a font that can be closest to Nastaleeq so that it can be acceptable to the Urdu readers. Here are links to Urdu fonts.

http://www.urdustan.net/u-hoo/index.php?action=displaycat&catid=26

If you are interested in learning Urdu script, you might find this book useful.