Nastaleeq: A challenge accepted by Omega

Urdu is the lingua franca as well as the national language of Pakistan. It is based on Arabic script, and Nastaleeq is its default writing style. The complexity of Nastaleeq makes it one of the world’s most challenging writing styles. Nastaleeq has a strong contextual dependency. It is a cursive writing style and is written diagonally from right to left. The overlapping shapes make the nuqta (dots) and kerning problem even harder. With the advent of multilingual support in computer systems, different solutions have been proposed and implemented. But most of these are immature or platform-specific. This paper discuses the complexity of Nastaleeq and a solution that uses Omega as the typesetting engine for rendering Nastaleeq.