The statistics and other font details appearing on this page have been reproduced with their permission.

The content and design of this page rely largely on Alan Wood's Unicode Fonts and WAZU JAPAN's Urdu Unicode Fonts these sites are excellent and up-to-date resources to find fonts, text editors, browsers, and other Unicode resources. These fonts will probably work on most Linux systems, either now or in the future.

Kamal Abdali's Urdu on the Mac webpage provides instructions on how to enable Urdu and also provides a phonetic keyboard. However, support is limited to applications like TextEdit and Safari.

Using the Mac's own Arabic Unicode fonts, the user will be able to view Urdu-encoded websites using Safari and to produce Unicode-compliant documents using TextEdit. Perso-Arabic scripts are supported from OS X (10.3.x), with the optional installation of additional language support. While OS X also recognizes OpenType layout tables, it uses a different rendering engine (ATSUI), and these fonts are written for Microsoft's engine (called Uniscribe). They are unsuitable for use with Macintosh computers, because they make use of OpenType technology, developed jointly by Microsoft and Adobe, for displaying vowel signs ( matras) and ligatures appropriately. The fonts recommended on this page have been tested for functionality on PCs running Windows XP.

: A free, open-source office suite project that is Unicode-savvy, OpenType enabled, and able to run on Linux/Sparc, Mac OS X (with X11), and all modern Windows platforms, including Windows 95.

Follow the instructions above about how to enable South Asian language support before installing this keyboard. This keyboard is phonetic and like the InPage keyboard.

The Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing provides a Urdu Phonetic Keyboard for Windows.

As the default Urdu keyboard is not phonetic, many users may prefer to install a phonetic one (see below). The keyboard may be viewed with the On-screen Keyboard Viewer ( Start > Program Files > Utilities > Accessibility > On Screen Keyboard).

Windows XP/Vista Keyboard Layout: Microsoft Windows XP includes keyboard layouts for typing with Urdu Unicode fonts through the installation of its optional multilingual support.įollow the instructions about 'Enabling South Asian Language Support' and 'Activating Keyboard Layouts' on the 'How to Install Fonts and Layouts' page (in the left navigation bar).

Input Schemes and Keyboard Layoutsįor typing in Urdu on Windows platforms, the SALRC recommends the following options: Note: Also supports Balochi, Brahui, Kashmiri, Lahnda, Panjabi Shahmukhi, Pashto, and Sindhi. Commercial font supplied with Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP.

Inpage urdu phonetic keyboard image