Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2020 July 28

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July 28

Monospace font that can handle Urdu characters?

I frequently work with text in the Urdu language, and while the default monospace font I have installed (probably DejaVu Mono?) can handle standard Arabic and Persian characters just fine, its rendering of letters that are found exclusively in Urdu and Urdu-based scripts (e.g. ھ and ں) is a bit more iffy: it always shows the characters in their isolated forms, and does not join them together (which, as anyone who is familiar with Arabic-based scripts can understand, is problematic). An example is the Urdu word ہیں: it is rendered as three disjoint letters in monospace as I type here.

Does anyone know of a mono typeface that I could use to solve this issue? Best, M Imtiaz (talk · contribs) 08:46, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

In my monospace edit window I see them connected; Chrome element inspection just gives: font-family: sans-serif; the actual typeface looks like Courier. Selecting Courier in OpenOffice and pasting in {{lang|ur|{{nq|ہیں}}}} also renders the Nastaliq as connected script.  --Lambiam 11:14, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

GNU Unifont has glyphs for every printable code point in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) (the first 65,536 code points of the Unicode space) and a huge amount -- and growing steadily -- of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP). The following languages are complete: Afrikaans, Arabic, Archaic Greek Letters, Armenian, Baltic, Basic Cyrillic, Basic Greek, Basic Latin, Bengali, Catalan, Central European, Cherokee, Chess Symbols, Chinese Zhuyin Fuhao, Claudian Letters, Coptic, Devanagari, Dutch, Esperanto, Ethiopic, Euro, Farsi, Georgian, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hanunó'o, Hebrew, Igbo Onwu, IPA, Japanese Jinmeiyo, Japanese Kokuji, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean Hangul, Lao, Latin Ligatures, Malayalam, Mongolian, Myanmar, New Tai Lue, N’Ko, Ogham, Oriya, Osmanya, Pan African Latin, Pashto, Pinyin, Polytonic Greek, Romanian, Runic, Simplified Chinese, Sindhi, Sinhala, Syriac, Tai Le, Tai Tham (Lanna), Tamil, Telugu, Thaana, Thai, Tibetan, Tifinagh, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Uighur, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Urdu, Vai, Vietnamese, Western European, and Yi.

Other sources to try (please report back here if any of them are especially good or especially bad):

• Urdu Font Project: https://sourceforge.net/projects/urdufontproject/
• urdufonts.net: https://urdufonts.net/
• urdufont.org: https://www.urdufont.org/
• Noto Nastaliq Urdu: https://www.google.com/get/noto/
• Awami Nastaliq: https://software.sil.org/awami/
• URDU on Computers: https://geomete.com/urdumac.html

--Guy Macon (talk) 13:17, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Thank you very much, Guy Macon. Unifont is working out great (other than the fact that it could be a bit lighter on the eyes :-) )

Those other fonts that you list are mostly non-monospace and yes I'm aware that Unifont is technically duospace, so they wouldn't have helped in my case, but since you asked me to report back here, I'll provide feedback anyway: Noto Nastaliq Urdu and Awami Nastaliq are both very good fonts for Urdu text. Awami Nastaliq has several advantages (listed at the page you link) which make it a better option for most typing, in my opinion, but unfortunately it does not work well with applications that do not support Graphite, so NNU would be better in those cases.

Thanks again for the help, M Imtiaz (talk · contribs) 15:24, 28 July 2020 (UTC)