Awami Nastaliq is a Nastaliq-style Arabic script font supporting a wide variety of languages of South Asia, including but not limited to Urdu. This font is aimed at minority language support.
Lesser-known languages often require more vowel diacritics than Urdu. They may use a different set of base characters and diacritics, and the base characters often include more nuqtas to represent sounds that are not present in Urdu or standard Arabic. Awami Nastaliq includes all the vowel diacritics and base characters (that we are aware of) required for languages using the Nastaliq style of Arabic script. This makes it unique among Nastaliq fonts.
Nastaliq, based on a centuries-old calligraphic tradition, is considered one of the most beautiful scripts on the planet. Nastaliq has been called “the bride of calligraphy” but its complexity also makes it one of the most difficult scripts to render using a computer font. Its right-to-left direction, vertical nature, and context-specific shaping provide a challenge to any font rendering engine and make it much more difficult to render than the flat (Naskh) Arabic script that it is based on.
As a result, font developers have long struggled to produce a font with the correct shaping but at the same time avoid overlapping of dots and diacritics. In order to account for the seemingly infinite variations, the Graphite rendering engine, and this font, have both been extended just to handle these complexities properly.
