Reading Urdu on this Blog (and on the Web)

On this page

This page contains some general help for viewing and reading Urdu on computers and the Web, and some specific help just for this blog. You can leave any queries/comments/rectifications in the comment box below, and I’ll try to answer as quickly as possible.

Some general tidbits

Reading Urdu on the Web is most usually a matter of installing the correct fonts. (Some good fonts are available here.) Of course, you must already know how to read Urdu text, or otherwise you’ll end up submitting a comment like this or this!

Also, please use a modern and standards compliant web browser. I recommend Mozilla Firefox.

A general font installation guide for Windows is available here.

Encoding

Sometimes, the problem may not be the missing fonts but the character set encoding. This is usually the case when the text doesn’t even remotely resemble anything like Urdu, but garbage like بینØ.

If that is the case, you need to select the proper encoding for your web browser. In Firefox 2.0+, it can be done by selecting View > Character Encoding > Unicode (UTF-8).

For this blog

Instructions in this section are for helping you to make sure that Urdu on this blog is displayed correctly and legibly in your web browser. If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (ugh, by the way) or lower, I offer my apologies in advance.

Hopefully, proper encoding (UTF-8) will be selected automatically by your web browser. Fonts used in the CSS of this blog are as follows:

  1. Nafees Web Naskh
  2. Urdu Naskh Asiatype (the same used by BBC Urdu)
  3. Tahoma
  4. Arial Unicode MS
  5. Verdana

Each of the above fonts will be searched for (in that order) in your computer. That is, if Nafees Web Naskh is not found, then Urdu Naskh Asiatype will be tried, and so on. If none of these fonts are found, your web browser’s default sans serif font will be used. I recommend that you download Nafees Web Naskh; it’s not the prettiest of them all, but it’s good enough.

For headings, Nafees Nastaleeq v1.01 and Nafees Nastaleeq are tried first (except, of course, in IE6).

You can download these fonts by clicking on the links and following the instructions. Tahoma, Arial Unicode MS, and Verdana will already be present on your computer if you are using Windows 2000/XP.

3 comments

1

Hala

Jun 5th, 2006 at 4:24 pm

Love this post

2

Aidan Kehoe

Apr 2nd, 2007 at 5:28 pm

Chances are that you have arrived on this page because you were having trouble with Urdu on this blog. And that’s not good, you know. Not good at all.

So here’s what you need to do.

Of course, some benighted souls can’t read Urdu on paper either, so your instructions don’t help us ;-) . Excellent blog, by the way!

[Edit by Saadat: The text that is quoted by Aidan in his comment is from an earlier version of this page.]

3

Saadat

Apr 4th, 2007 at 6:53 pm

Aidan Kehoe: My deepest apologies to those “benighted” souls :D . And thanks for liking the blog!

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