Awami Nastaliq - About
About this project
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. 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 has been extended just to handle these complexities properly.
For more information on the visual characteristics of the font see Design.
Future plans
This font is actively maintained and improved, and recent changes to its development process will enable more frequent releases.
The highest priorities for future additions and enhancements are mainly driven by:
- New additions to The Unicode Standard
- Requests from language communities using the fonts
- Needs of the linguistic and academic community
Please send us your requests using the form on the font website. If you are interested in helping us make the font better see the Developer page.
Announcement list
If you wish to receive announcements about updates to any of our SIL fonts, please subscribe to our SIL Font News Announcement List. This is an announcement-only list with messages approximately once a month. It does not allow any discussion.
You can subscribe using either of the two following options.
If you use a Google profile and join the group, you will be able to access the group and control your subscription and notification options with a web browser. Make sure you are logged in to your Google profile and go to the SIL Font News Google Group. Click on Join group.
If you would rather not use a Google profile, you can subscribe any email address by sending a message to sil-font-news+subscribe@groups.sil.org and following the instructions you get in the confirmation message.
Our font announcements are also available through X (formerly Twitter) @silfonts.
Supporting the project
These fonts are provided at no cost; however, they are expensive to produce and maintain. Please consider donating to SIL’s font development efforts to support future development. Go to SIL’s Give Direct page. Thank you!
About SIL Global
SIL Global is a global, faith-based nonprofit that works with local communities around the world to develop language solutions that expand possibilities for a better life.
We are involved in approximately 1,350 active language projects in 104 countries. These projects impact more than 1.1 billion people within 1,600 local communities. SIL’s work brings together more than 4,300 staff from 89 countries who work alongside thousands more local partners and community volunteers worldwide. Our services are available without regard to religious belief, political ideology, gender, race or ethnic background.
Our Vision: We long to see people flourishing in community using the languages they value most.
Our Mission: Inspired by God’s love, we advocate, build capacity, and work with local communities to apply language expertise that advances meaningful development, education, and engagement with Scripture.
SIL Language Technology supports these activities by developing software, fonts, and keyboard technologies.