Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing (CRULP, www.crulp.org <http://www.crulp.org/> ) at National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences ( www.nu.edu.pk <http://www.nu.edu.pk/> ) is pleased to announce Beta release of character-based Nafees Web Naskh Open Type Font for writing Urdu in Naskh script based on Unicode standard. Guidance and calligraphy of basic glyphs for the font has been provided by Syed Jameel-ur-Rehman. He is pupil of Syed Nafees Shah and Hafiz Syed Anees-ul-Hassan.
Previous Nafees Fonts were focused on maintaining the calligraphic beauty of Urdu. Therefore, numerous rules were put it which made the fonts slow. This made Nafees Nastaleeq, Nafees Naskh and Nafees Pakistani Naskh fonts harder to use with web pages. Keeping this problem in view, CRULP team has worked in developing a simplified Naskh style, still trying to maintain the beauty of Urdu Naskh. Nafees Web Naskh OTF contains approximately 250 glyphs, including 2 ligatures. With very few OpenType substitution rules and not a single OpenType positioning rule, this font is much faster than all of the other Nafees Fonts and can be extensively used for making Urdu web sites. The font is also developed with a flat qat to enable better viewing at small font sizes. This font also supports the basic ASCII characters.
This font is being released with an Open Source License (available at the website)
We hope that release of these fonts from CRULP will further promote the usage of Urdu over the internet, and electronic communication and publication, and promote the cause of Urdu computing.
Nafees Web Naskh is freely downloadable from <http://www.crulp.nu.edu.pk> www.crulp.nu.edu.pk or <http://www.crulp.org> www.crulp.org. Please send comments and report bugs at CrulpFonts@nu.edu.pk <mailto:CrulpFonts@nu.edu.pk> . Apologies, if this is a repeat message.
