sil-awami-nastaliq-fonts

Awami Nastaliq is a Nastaliq-style Arabic script font family supporting a wide variety of languages of southwest 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.

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