Web pages in Urdu

HOW TO MAKE URDU WEBPAGE

Lately I have been getting questions from some of the vistors of my site about how to make webpages in Urdu. First of all, I thank all of you who have written me and also to those who have visited my sites and have not written. It is very encouraging to know that your site is really visted by others and that they also found it usefull.

That stimulated me to update some contents of the pages and to add some new pages. This attempt is one of those pages. Here I will discuss the type of Urdu pages that exist on Internet.  

Most of the Urdu webpages are  made of Urdu images. This is the oldest form of publishing Urdu webpages. There are many serious and wonderful Urdu sites, with long standing reputations and full of useful and enjoyable contents. Most Urdu Newspapers, magazines and business sites are using this method.  

It is easy to make, visitors do not have to download any font since Urdu text is displayed as image. The Urdu is written, formatted and designed in one of the Urdu software such as Inpage, Kaatib, Raakim, etc. and then converted (exported) to as an image. It can also be made of hand written text, hand made calligraphy or from printed material using scanner.  

The down side of this is that search engines don t see text in images, page full of images takes longer to appear on visitor s screen.  

Examples of these pages are pages of Jang, Jasarat, Takbeer, etc.  

If you want to make these pages, it is easy to do. All you need is either one of Urdu software to write and graphic software to make image files; or a scanner and good printed material. With some good knowledge of displaying images on web pages you can produce very impressive WebPages.  

To see example of this method, visit  Nawa-e-Tokyo   I discovered last week.  

The second type of pages is font pages. Jang is a good example of it. They are offering font pages parallel to their image pages on their sites in  Rehman fonts . To read these pages you have to Plug in to Urdu Plug-in. This is Nastaleeq font and its plug-in is usually self installed on the visitor s computer system. Download time of such page is short enough and the page is displayed in almost no time.  

You can make these pages using Urdu software  Urdu 98 . I do not have any experience of using this software, so I can hardly say any thing about how easy or difficult is it to make a webpage using this method, but you can find more about it by visiting site of Pakdata.com.  

The third type of Urdu, Farsi pages which you can find on Internet are font pages using one of Urdu software to write in fonts which are compatible with Windows and can be copy/pasted in Word, FrontPage or directly to html file. To read these pages, visitors have to have these fonts installed on their computers. These fonts are available to be downloaded free of charge.  

The Urdu word processors usually used for writing in these character-based Type face Fonts for writing Urdu are ParsNegar, Urdu Nigar, Devalipi Urdu and fonts used are UmairI, UrduWeb, Urdu Chee& & , "URDU Khat-e-Naqsh", etc. These are Naskh type fonts and not Nastaleeq. Urdu readers are habitual to read in beautiful, calligraphic script Nastaleeq. Unlike Persian and Arabic readers, who have been using typewriters for writing and printing machines like linotype and monotype for publishing for more than a century, Urdu reader has never given up the use of Nastaleeq script.  We rarely used typewriters for writing Urdu and our books and newspaper were never printed on rotary type setting machines, instead we shifted from lithography to photo offset printing machines, never quitting the use of Nastaleeq script.  

There are many sites which are solely devoted to Urdu utilities, word processors and fonts and have very useful links to download fonts and freeware. So, it is pointless to repeat every thing over again. Some pages can be found by searching for key phrase  Urdu solution , others for keywords like  Urdu software ,  Urdu fonts etc. One such page, I found, is http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~alishah/urdufont/index.htm

By giving links I don t want to limit your ingenuity and luck in discovering something new and better to meet your requirements. Lot of people, younger and more energetic than me, are publishing good stuff on Internet. They deserve to be discovered and encouraged. Go and search for information you need, some one is certainly out there to share his knowledge with you.

NEW DEVELOPMENT
 

Unicode fonts are surely a long waited development and is bound to change the way to prepare Urdu documents on computers. Now you don t need to have a separate Urdu word processor or right to left utility to write Urdu, you can write it directly in MS Word or any other Microsoft application. Operating system WindowsXP professional or home is offering to install any language of the world on your computer, including those written from right to left, along with their keyboards, fonts and all that goes with.  

Now it is possible to compose Urdu WebPages using Microsoft Frontpage, MS Word, WordPad, notepad, html text editor, etc.  

There are already many Urdu WebPages in Unicode fonts. To read them you don t have to have WindowsXP, but just proper Unicode fonts installed on your computer and Internet Explorer 5+. Search engine can read them and you can search for Urdu keywords. As more and more sites will be in Unicode fonts and more and more contents will be available on Internet in Urdu we will have a rich library of literature, articles, information and knowledge available on Internet in our national language as any other developed nation of the world.  

Most of the computers with Windows have Unicode font Tahoma already installed on them. It is not so beautiful as Nastaleeq or even Naskh, but is most practical. Though Urdu readers are stubborn in rejecting any script which is different from Nastaleeq, one can get used to read this font quickly, especially young generation and English medium school going class, who is poor in reading Nastaleeq script, in any way. Most of the webpages are in Urdu Naskh Asiatype, which has better calligraphy. By inserting font face tag for both fonts, you can give a choice to reader whether to download Urdu Naskh Asiatype or not.

بسم ﷲ الرحمن الرحیم 

More recent development has brought forward Nafees Naskh and Nafees Nastaleeq fonts developed by the Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing at National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (www.nu.edu.pk). Both are character-based Open Type Font for writing Urdu in Naskh and Nastaleeq script, based on the Unicode standard. Nafees Naskh allows Urdu computing on Microsoft 2000, NT, XP, Java (JDK1.4), Unix and Linux platforms. These fonte enable desktop and Internet publishing, and electronic communication in Urdu using existing software (without any plug-ins) supporting OTF specifications. Both fonts are freely downloadable from www.crulp.org or www.nu.edu.pk. 

Nafees Nasta leeq font is a great achievement if we consider the complications involved with glyphs and ligatures required for this script. This was achieved by InPage with more than 84 font files occupying 13MB space. However Nafees Nastaleeq occupies very small memory space. It contains 1000 glyphs including 26 ligatures and takes only 394KB of space. 

Using these fonts with MS Word produces very beautiful Urdu documents, however, I still prefer to use Naskh Asiatype or even Tahoma for webpages. For some reason, space between the lines, when these fonts are used is very wide, almost similar to double space, which does not look very nice. Let s hope further development will improve it, too.  

A comparision of InPage Nastaleeq and Nafees Nastaleeq is given in pictures 1 and 2.  

InPage  Noori Nastaleeq	Nafees Nastaleeq

 Another example of Nafees Nastaleeq written in MS Word, copy/pasted in Paint.

In my next article I will write a step by step tutorial to design a simple Urdu web page, InshaAllah.

 

Urdu newspapers - Jang - Jasarat  - Takbeer