By TCN News
New Delhi: Department of Electronics and IT (DeitY) of Government of India has released Urdu keyboards for Windows and Android platform that will help in writing Urdu in Nastaliq.
Twelve Naskh fonts and one Nastaliq font along with keyboard drivers for Windows 32-bit and 64-bit operating system was officially released here today by Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communication and IT.
Nastaaliq is one of the most complex scripts to design. Nastaaliq moves both from right to left and vertically from top to bottom with the “nuqte” or dots conforming to a strict placement order.
Nastaaliq demands strict conformity with a specific grammar which has been honed and fine-tuned over the centuries.
The keyboard manager first released in January 2007 for Urdu was based on Inscript Keyboard layout. Now, the INSCRIPT standard has been enhanced to make it compliant to latest Unicode standard 6.2. The new Urdu Keyboard driver based on Enhanced INSCRIPT, gives freedom to the users for creating content, write e-mail, chat in Urdu using UNICODE compliant software. Urdu by nature is written right to left. It is capable of handling these right to left (RTL) scripts on any existing UNICODE compliant application, running under language enabled Windows such as – Notepad, MS-Word, etc in Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 and above editions.
Using Unicode enabled web-content creation tools; user can also create HTML documents which can be published on the Web / Internet. The documents, letters and data created using it are UNICODE based. User can use the application to type in various layouts such as INSCRIPT / PHONETIC / CUSTOM by pressing either Capslock / Numlock / Scroll Lock and can switch to English as and when required. The tool also comes with Virtual Onscreen Floating keyboard for click-typing or easy reference.
Urdu Enhanced INSCRIPT keyboard for Android support Android version 4.1 and above. Android powers many of the smart phones these days. The Urdu keyboard can be download from the appstore here:
http://apps.mgov.gov.in/descp.do?appid=377&action=9