Topic on Talk:Universal Language Selector

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T58939

We'd like to add a Nastaʿlīq (also written Nastalique, Nastaleeq, Nastaliq) font, but so far no free one was found. There is one which is worth asking about to the author.

I would like to request the default font for Urdu to be a Nastaliq font like Jameel Noori Nastaleeq, Urdu Typesetting, etc. This proposal has been twice rejected here so I am raising the issue on the ULS. Further details can be had there. Hope no one objects...

What font do you suggest? We did some research and Nafees Web Naskh was the only recent free font available, see bugzilla:46693. The others were either obsoleted or unfree.

I was asking for a Nastaliq font, of which the best I've found is "Jameel Noori Nastaliq". Naskh (Nafees) is not the standard way of transcribing Urdu.

That is, http://www.urdujahan.com/font.html ? Thanks for letting us know. The website and zip don't contain any information about licensing; another website says "License: freeware". If you wish this font to be included, please contact the author and ask a free license to be included. Also see Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector for more instructions.

This all requires some further clarification:

• At a unicode level, this all uses arabic text (as far as I'm able to tell, and I'm not sure if there are differences in shaping)
• Nastaliq is the traditional writing style of Urdu language.
• Due to the availability of Naskh scripts (which are also easier to render due to more consistent line height), it has become more common for urdu to be represented in naskh in digital media.
• This is considered to be undesirable however.
• There is no known free nastaliq font.
• There are however nastaliq fonts available on Windows 8, but since they share the same script, they apparently don't really get easily selected by the font systems.
• There is a desire to make https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Script/Nastaliq unneeded, but this is a requirement that ULS cannot fulfill because of the above reasons

So some points to address:

1. A free Nastaliq font is desirable and
2. En.wp doesn't really know what the Urdu wikipedia community thinks of this, it might be useful to figure that out.
3. A temporary solution might be to make it possible to redefine system font styles in a certain language. So you could have in the font drop down for urdu:
   1. nastaliq system

      font-family: "Jameel Noori Nastaleeq", "Urdu Typesetting", sans-serif;
      

   2. NafeesWeb
   3. system default

There is a nice article on Nastaliq typesetting here

BTW, if Fraktur is an ISO15924 defined script variant, it makes you wonder why the different arabic script styles are not/should not defined. There was a very long discussion about this on the unicode mailing list that I have not yet entirely read: http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2005-m11/0094.html

There is this old non-unicode Nastaliq SIL font: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=Nastaliq Not usable of course, but perhaps SIL. Open font library has Hussaini Nastaleeq though, which is MIT (X11) licensed apparently and a descendant of Nafees Nastaleeq. Might be interesting ?

As you can see in bugzilla:46693, we were aware of the former, but not of the latter. It says however that it's a fork from CRULP's Nafees which, in the version linked from the bug, was not free; the page it links is down but Internet Archive has a copy, the license is not standard. It should be clarified whether the author got from CRULP permission to license his derivative under MIT license, or what.

@Nemo_bis Doesn't NafeesWeb have the exact same license though ? http://www.cle.org.pk/software/localization/Fonts/nafeesWebNaskh.html

For that one Kartik found a waiver. Have you read the bug that I've linked about half a dozen times by now in this thread? :)

Well that information isn't in the ticket that I read. It is however hidden in the commit message.

Not sure if this is still an open issue. Could Noto be a possible free font?

https://www.google.com/get/noto/#nastaliq-aran

Its free. 103.94.130.3