Nuur-e-Faanuus / नूर-ए-फ़ानूस / نور فانوس

Thoughts and views on Urdu poetry.

January 15, 2007

Typing Text in Urdu

Many readers have contacted me for instructions on how to type text in Urdu script.

There is an excellent site, South Asia Language Resource Center, provided by The University of Chicago at the following link:

http://salrc.uchicago.edu/resources/fonts/available/urdu/ .

This site will provide links to a wide variety of fonts as well as instructions on how to install them and how to install keyboard layouts. I recommend using the Windows 2000/XP Keyboard Layout if you are a Windows user.

To get the best presentation of the Urdu script as compared to regular Arabic, the Nafees Nastaleeq and Farsi Simple Bold fonts provide the best results. It is important to understand that your documents or Web postings will not appear in these fonts on other readers' computers unless they have them installed as well. Documents or Web pages created using the Arial, Times New Roman, or Tahoma fonts will not have this problem, however, since those fonts are standard on Windows systems.