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Writing Urdu on your computer (and on this Blog)

On this page

This page is a simple guide to help you write (or more correctly, type) Urdu on your computer. (You might as well want to read a similar page about correctly viewing Urdu.)

Please let me know if something is incorrect or needs more explanation by leaving a comment below.

A little theory first

Don’t worry. I’ll try to be as less boring as possible.

Urdu is a language that is written right-to-left, in contrast with most other languages, such as English, that are written left-to-right. Computers need to differentiate between these two directions in order to render and input the respective text correctly. Thus, your operating system needs to have some sort of support built into itself for right-to-left languages.

After this right-to-left support, you need to tell your operating system that you intend to write in Urdu. In usual cases, whenever you press the ‘S’ key, an ’s’ or ‘S’ appears on the screen. Fair enough. However, when your are typing some text in Urdu, your computer needs to know that when you press the ‘S’ key, you actually mean a ‘س‘ (just an example). For this purpose, what you need is a keyboard layout that will take care of all these key-meaning associations.

Enough talk! Time for action!

The instructions given below are for Microsoft Windows XP. I shall add other operating systems as soon as I get a chance to play around (and mess up) with them.

Please note that the screenshots provided may differ from your computer’s desktop environment/theme.

Step 1: Right-to-left support

You will need the Windows XP Installation CD (or an alternative installation source) for this step.

First, go to Control Panel. (Click on Start, then Settings, and then Control Panel. Or if you are not using the Classic Start Menu, then simply Start > Control Panel.)

Next, enter Regional and Language Options.

However, if your computer’s Control Panel displays the Category View, then click Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options and then Regional and Language Options.

A dialog box titled “Regional and Language Options” will appear. Click on its Languages tab.

Check the option that says “Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages (including Thai)“. (If you are like me, you’ll wonder what so special is about Thai. Short explanation: Thai language requires special rules for word breaking and warping. Long explanation: No idea!)

Click OK. You’ll be prompted to insert the Windows XP installation CD, after which Windows will do some magic.

That’s it. Your computer now supports right-to-left languages. Simple, huh?

Step 2: Installing the keyboard layout

There are several Urdu keyboard layouts available; however, my personal favourite is CRULP Urdu Phonetic Keyboard Layout, released by Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing (CRULP). Even though the instructions below are for installing this phonetic keyboad layout, installing other keyboard layouts is similar and shouldn’t be difficult.

First, click on this link to go to the keyboard layout’s page on CRULP’s website, and download it. Unzip the zip file and run setup.exe. It will display a success message after installation.

Now, visit Regional and Language Options (in the Control Panel) again. Go again in the Languages tab, and click the button that says “Details…”

A new dialog box titled “Text Services and Input Languages” will appear, showing a list of installed keyboard layouts. Since you need to add into this list the Urdu keyboard layout that you just installed, click the button that says “Add…“.

Another dialog box titled “Add Input language” will appear. Select “Urdu” for “Input language”, and “CRULP Urdu Phonetic v1.1” for “Keyboard layout/IME”.

Click OK. The Urdu keyboard layout should now appear in the list.

Now that was pretty simple too, wasn’t it?

Step 3: Test

After the keyboard layout is added succesfully, you should also start seeing the Language Bar somewhere on the Desktop (or on top of the current window), as shown below. The appearance of the Language Bar may differ (and you can customize it later), but the tiny blue icon which says EN is all that matters right now. This is telling you that if you type anything right now, it will be interpretd as English by your operating system.

If you click the EN icon, something like below will appear. Select “UR Urdu” and the blue icon will change itself from EN to UR. As long as the Language Bar shows this UR, everything you type will be in Urdu. To switch back to English, click the UR and change it to EN. Plain and simple.

Now, for the testing part.

Open WordPad (Start > (All) Programs > Accessories > WordPad). Change the font to any Urdu font that you have installed, or if there is none, change it to Tahoma. Increase the font size as well, just for the sake of clarity (12–14 points will be fine).

Next, switch to UR in the Language Bar. Now hit these keys: P - A - K - S - T - A - N. You should see پاکستان written in the WordPad window.

Congratulations!

You can now write Urdu in almost any software (but not all) that lets you type and supports Unicode. (Unicode is a standard for representing and manipulating text from different writing systems of the world.)

Step 4: Practice!

Typing in Urdu can be a pretty tiresome job if you are new to it. The only thing that you can do to make yourself comfortable with it is practice. Some tips are below:

1. On the download page for CRULP Urdu Phonetic Keyboard Layout, there is also a link that says “Release Notes”. It’s a PDF file with information on the keyboard layout, but more importantly, it contains the mappings of Urdu alphabets for the keys of your computer’s keyboard. Use it as a reference whenever you can’t find any Urdu alphabet on the keyboard.
2. Use a better Unicode text editor for creating and editing your Urdu text files. I recommend using BabelPad. It lets you select keyboard layouts through its own interface, so you don’t need to go to the Language Bar, and it also has several tools for working with Unicode and Unicode fonts.
3. If you want to create fully formatted documents in Urdu, you can do so by using Microsoft Word, or OpenOffice.org Writer, or any other word processor. Please refer to the respective help files of your word processor for specifying the right-to-left direction and other issues. (They are not much difficult, so you shouldn’t have any problem.)

Alternatives

If you don’t want to install the keyboard layout for some reason, there are other methods for typing in Urdu.

One of them is the Urdu OpenPad. It is written in Javascript and runs in your web browser, so there’s no need for installation or any other related jazz. If all you want is to write small snippets in Urdu and then copy & paste them to some other place, then OpenPad is perfect for the job.

Writing Urdu on this blog

The only place in this blog where you would want to write Urdu is the comment box, and chances are that you have arrived here after following the link that promises more information about some mysterious tags.

First thing first, then. These tags (described below) do not magically enable your keyboard for typing Urdu. You need to have an Urdu keyboard layout installed in your operating system for that. If this is not the case, or if you don’t understand what I am talking about, then please go to the top of this page and start reading from there.

So you have an Urdu keyboard layout installed in your computer, or you have some other method of typing Urdu at your service, and you want to leave a comment on this blog in Urdu. So what do these tags do? They make sure that the Urdu you will type gets displayed in the correct markup and with appropriate styling, so that there is no problem in reading it.

Here we go then.

[p:ur][/p]

Use these when you are writing an Urdu paragraph. For example, if you type this:

[p:ur]یہ اردو کا ایک پیراگراف ہے، جس کا مقصد فی الحال کچھ بھی نہیں ہے۔[/p]

It will appear as:

یہ اردو کا ایک پیراگراف ہے، جس کا مقصد فی الحال کچھ بھی نہیں ہے۔

[w:ur][/w]

Use these tags when you want to write an Urdu word or phrase inside an English sentence. For example:

Cat is called [w:ur]بِلّی[/w] in Urdu.

This will appear as:

Cat is called بِلّی in Urdu.

If you wish to enter your name in Urdu in the comment form, you can use the same tags around it, and it will be styled properly.

[w:en][/w]

These tags are opposite of the previous. Use them when you want to write an English word or phrase inside an Urdu sentence. For example:

[p:ur]ہم نے بچپن میں ایک بِلّا پال رکھا تھا، جسے ہم [w:en]Tom[/w] کہتے تھے۔[/p]

This will appear as:

ہم نے بچپن میں ایک بِلّا پال رکھا تھا، جسے ہم Tom کہتے تھے۔

Note that the text with tags is slightly confusing to read, but that’s what happens when we are playing with raw bi-directional text.

Feel free to play around with these tags in the comment box below. Try to be creative, though!

The only downside of these tags that is known to me is that they also appear in the comments feed. This is because the plugin that I am using to replace these tags with XHTML markup does not perform a permanent substitution, and only replaces these tags when the comment is retrieved from the database and is about to be displayed. I hope I’ll hack the plugin soon to do a permanent replacement, but considering my reputation, it might not be soon enough.

That’s it, folks. Please leave a comment if I’ve been wrong somewhere, or if you have any queries.

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• For writing Urdu: Wrap an Urdu paragraph between [p:ur] and [/p]. To write an English word/sentence within an Urdu paragraph, wrap it between [w:en] and [/w]. To write an Urdu word/sentence within an English paragraph (or to write your name in Urdu in the ‘Name’ field), wrap it between [w:ur] and [/w]. More details and examples are here.