See also Arabic for additional information.
Urdu is one of the national languages of Pakistan. The language is not related to Arabic, but to languages of Northern India, especially Hindi. In fact, many linguists consider Urdu and Hindi to be the same language written in two different scripts with different technical vocabulary.
During the Mughal period in Northern India, some people in the Hindustan region converted to Islam and began using the Arabic script. This language became Urdu. Others remained Hindu and used the Devanagari alphabet. This language became Hindi.
Because Urdu is close to Hindi, their language uses letters not found in Arabic. Urdu speakers need both Arabic script support and Urdu support. In addition, Urdu is written in a Nastaliq style of Arabic cursive distinct from the letters used for the Arabic language.
Other languages spoken in Pakistan typically use the Nastaliq version of the Arabic script with with extra letters. Neither Microsoft or Apple support these languages directly, but fonts and language codes are available
See also the Devanagari page for information on how using this script for these languages.
The Arabic script has two features which make it unique in terms of encoding. One is that it is written from right to left (or RTL ). The other feature is that the shapes of individual letters change forms depending on whether the letter is alone, at the beginning of a word, the middle of a word or at the end.
In order to process Arabic correctly, a software must be able to display text from right to left and make sure the letter forms are displayed correctly depending on their positions within a word. Unfortunately, there is incomplete implementation of creating correct letter forms in many software packages.
In order to integrate foreign scripts into your computer, you must set up "keyboard" utilities in your operating system. Keyboards will allow you to switch between typing English and other languages in word processors and Web tools. This process will also make sure the correct fonts are installed are availble for Windows or Macintosh.
As of Spring 2005, the international word processor Global Writer is available in the Student Computing Labs. This allows users to easily switch keyboards, including phonetic keyboards which mimic a QWERTY keyboard.
CLC Student Computing Labs: To open Global Writer, go to the Start » Internatinal Language Support » Unitype Global Writer.
Global Writer is available from Unitype for personal purchace.
1. An Urdu keyboard is available in Windows, but you may have to install it from the Windows System disk because it is a complex script. See the Windows complex Keyboard Instructions for details on how to activate the keyboard.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]2. A phonetic Urdu Keyboard is also available from an Urdu native speaker and developer, but follow installation instructions carefully.
See instructions for configuring right to left typing in Word for Windows for tips on how to type RTL languages.
Apple does not provide an Urdu Keyboard for the Macintosh, but does provide keyboards for Persian, Dari, Pashto, Uzbek and Arabic. Additional Urdu characters may be inserted from Character Palette in the OS X operating system.
Some third party utilities are available, but have not been tested.
Another option is to run an Urdu word processors under a Windows simulator or the X11 Unix operating system.
See tips for creating Mac Right-to-Left documents (including alternatives to Microsoft Office) for more information.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]If you have your browser configured correctly, the Web sites above should display the correct characters for Urdu Unicode pages. If you have difficulties, see list below for font and browser configuration instructions.
www.urdulife.com/font/download/
Note: Some Urdu sites are not in Unicode, but provide free fonts to download.
Additional freeware fonts can be downloaded from from the sites below, and some include Persian support. Note that not all these fonts may work on System 9 for Macintosh, but will work in Windows and OS X .
See also
Browsers which fully support Unicode are the strongly recommended. Click link in list to view configuration instructions. You will be asked to match a script with a font.
Note on System 9: Because Unicode support is incomplete in System 9, it may be beneficial to upgrade to OS X if you need to work with Unicode.
If you see Roman character gibberish instead of Urdu you will may to manually switch from Western encoding view to the Unicode encoding under the View menu of your browser.
These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.
Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.
To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.
Generic Encoding Template
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=??? ">
...
<head>Declare Unicode
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8 ">
...
<head>
The final close slash must be included after the final quote mark in the encoding header tag if you are using XHTML
Declare Unicode in XHTML
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<head>
If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. In that case many Unicode characters could be displayed incorrectly. Also, older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 may not be able to process the entity codes correctly without the "utf-8" declaration.
Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are meta data tags which indicate the page of a language, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.
One option is to use FrontPage, Netscape/Mozilla Composer or Dreamweaver and change the keyboard to the correct script. Make sure you specify the encoding in the Web page header.
Another option is to compose the basic text in an international or foreign languags text editor or word processor and export the content as an HTML or text file with the appropriate encoding. This file could be opened in another HTML editor such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver an edited for formatting.
Some HTML editors set the direction of the text automatically. but it can also be set manually by using the newer <dir> and <bdo> attributes. See the Right-to-Left Alignment Tips page for more details.
In some cases, your best options may be to use PDF files or image files. See the Web Development Tips section for more details.
Note: Mac users can install Windows fonts, but some ligature features may not function correctly.
These Web sites provide additional information on developing Right-to-Left Pages.
