Languages survive digitally when they are easy to type, render, publish, and search – standards InPage helped establish but could not sustain indefinitely.
Full disclosure. I’m British. Foreign languages are not part of my DNA. But I’m endlessly fascinated by them. Like complex maths equations, I’m often captivated by the beauty and elegance of the script ‘though it has no meaning to me. The internet has revealed to me languages and scripts I’d never seen on my travels.
Urdu is one I had encountered, both in India and Pakistan But the digitisation of Urdu publishing, I’ve learned this week, hinges on a single software developed in 1994 that transformed an entire industry.
InPage, created by India’s Concept Software, emerged when Pakistani newspapers still employed armies of calligraphers to hand-write last-minute corrections for lithographic printing.
The software offered genuine Nastaliq rendering – the ornate, sloping script considered essential for Urdu’s aesthetic integrity – through an innovative ligature-based system storing thousands of pre-designed character combinations.
Technological Lock-in and Market Realities
InPage’s success created unintended consequences. The software’s proprietary nature meant Urdu text remained trapped within its ecosystem; early versions only exported content as image files, rendering text unsearchable and inaccessible.
Widespread piracy accelerated adoption – millions of users accessed cracked versions – yet simultaneously discouraged investment in alternatives or upgrades.
This fostered a publishing culture dependent on outdated workflows, with newspapers publishing articles as images rather than live text well into the Unicode era.
The Nastaliq Challenge
The technical complexity of Nastaliq itself complicated progress. Unlike simpler scripts, Nastaliq, it seems, requires contextual letter shaping, diagonal word stacking, and precise dot placement. The first digital typeface, Noori Nastaliq (1981), required over 20,000 glyphs – predominantly ligatures incompatible with emerging Unicode standards.
While OpenType technology later enabled algorithmic glyph shaping, engineering quality Nastaliq fonts remains prohibitively difficult, leaving the market with few viable alternatives.
The View From The Beach
Contemporary publishing professionals should recognise that Roman Urdu’s prevalence signals a usability crisis rather than cultural decline. Users adopt Latin-script transliteration not so much because they prefer it as because proper Urdu input remains cumbersome across devices.
The path forward requires Unicode-first workflows, open-source Nastaliq fonts (such as Google’s Noto Nastaliq Urdu and Gulzar), and cross-platform compatibility.
For publishers, the priority is clear: treat Urdu as digital infrastructure requiring sustained investment in fonts, keyboards, and accessible input methods.
Languages survive digitally when they are easy to type, render, publish, and search – standards InPage helped establish but could not sustain indefinitely.
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsfeed.
