The Death of the Urdu Script
medium.com
The Death of the Urdu Script
1–10 of 141 posts
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#2That was an amazing article, and a great insight into middle eastern scripts in the digital world.
It doesn't look like it'll get out of the new queue, but I wanted to thank OP for sharing it anyway.
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#3Unsurprising to see a link to Michael Kaplan in there. His blog was taken down due to what sounds like a dispute over patents with his boss. See this twitter conversation between Spolsky and him: https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/447024470256283648.
--
"It has been made officially clear to me that [my] Blog ... is for all intents and purposes dead."
Well, I blogged about a patent and included art, so my former manager took the Blog down with extreme prejudice.
--
Blog is now archived at http://www.siao2.com/ and has much more information on localisation.
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#4Unsurprising to see a link to Michael Kaplan in there. His blog was taken down due to what sounds like a dispute over patents with his boss. See this twitter conversation between Spolsky and him: https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/447024470256283648 . -- "It has been made officially clear to me that [my] Blog ... is for all intents and purposes dead ." Well, I blogged about a patent and included art, so my former man…
Wat? I thought the whole point of patents is to make information public, because competitors are simply not allowed to use the information without payment anyway.
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#5This is Ali Eteraz. Thank you for recognizing this piece. It was a lot of fun to write. I've actually been to a Ycombinator event. Twice I think. A couple of your alumnus managed to talk me into downloading stuff or getting on email lists that, well, I didn't always use (though they did seem promising!). I am a writer based in the Bay Area and I really enjoy getting to learn about interesting technological developments and human stories within that. So definitely hit me up whenever you're congregating or plotting something interesting. My website is alieteraz.com or I am at @eteraz or FB.
Ali Eteraz
ps - I later got to meet Michael K. at the Unicode conference in Santa Clara, along with the Microsoft Windows team. The Windows Phone people, who I also really wanted to talk to because this is a mobile problem too, did not want to talk to me because they had a new phone coming out.
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#6For web development, perhaps you could create a simple system that detects if the user's device supports nastaliq. If not convert, it to naskh or Romanized Urdu (not sure which is preferred). As for dealing with all the data already written in naskh and Romanized Urdu, this is a bit more complicated because I am guessing there is not a one to one match between naskh and nastaliq (naskh has less letters), and Romanized Urdu and nastaliq. You would probably need to collect some data and use some machine learning techniques. If it is not too big you could use a client-side Javascript program, otherwise something like a Chrome extension or an API. There are similar things done for Arabic to handle various forms of Romanized Arabic (user does not have access to an Arabic keyboard) and Non-Modern Standard Arabic Dialects: http://www.yamli.com/
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#7There is another problem with fonts. Popular fonts used on the internet only have information about the joining of the 28 Arabic characters. When the extra characters in Urdu are typed they don't join with the other characters in the word. eg. I will type the first line of the couplet here. Note how the third,fourth and seventh word are broken up. اور باذار سے لے آے اگر ٹوٹ گیا
I have written about some other issues with the Urdu language over here. http://upgoerurdu.nfshost.com/technical.html
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#8> Utility had defeated tradition.
Is that supposed to be self-evidently bad?
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#9Meanwhile, in the free software world...
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ySTZaXP5XKFg0OpmHZM0...
https://github.com/behdad/harfbuzz/blob/master/test/shaping/...
(Harfbuzz is the default text layout engine for Linux GUI frameworks: Qt, GTK, etc)
Re: The Death of the Urdu Script
#10For web development, perhaps you could create a simple system that detects if the user's device supports nastaliq. If not convert, it to naskh or Romanized Urdu (not sure which is preferred). As for dealing with all the data already written in naskh and Romanized Urdu, this is a bit more complicated because I am guessing there is not a one to one match between naskh and nastaliq (naskh has less letters), and Romanize…
Data is stored as Unicode (except some really old desktop app formats that were written before Unicode). Naskh and Nastaliq are font styles, used when the system displays the data. The solution is simply that good Nastaliq fonts be created and then used on websites where Urdu is being used. Since Urdu fonts can be much larger in size than Roman fonts (the fonts have to specify joining behavior between all possible combination of characters), delivering over the web is not really viable. Fonts have to be native to all the OSes in existence, so that websites can use them.
(I don't think Roman Urdu is ever used for anything serious.)