urdu wordprocessing system

[r.l.schmidt at easteur-orient.uio.no]

>Dear colleagues!
>
>I am looking urgently for a good Urdu wordprocessing system. "Good" means it
>should be able to handle footnotes and provide a beautiful laser-printout in
>nastaliq-style (fonts scalable), suitable for publications (I know, I ask
>for too much!?).
>
>Thanks for solutions!
>
>Martin Bemmann 
>
>
>e-mail: amuellen at ix.urz.uni-heidelberg.de

Im afraid I can't offer you a solution, but here is my experience for what
little it is worth.  I hope that if you do find a solution that you will
share it with me.

I have seen Urdu wordprocessors in Pakistan (for IBM compatibles) that
produce attractive nastaliq. I also know people in the U.K. who use them. I
don't know the names of the commercial versions or whether they can do
footnotes and other document-processing things.  The freeware versions of
these fonts are called "Kaatib" and "Surkhaab".  I forget which is nastaliq
and which is naskh.  The freeware varieties don't appear to have many
word-processing capabilities, however I haven't used them myself, and doubt
that the people I observed using them were aware of the full potential of
modern word-processors.

I have not been very satisfied with the Apple Persian and Arabic fonts
which are adapted for Urdu by the addition of extra characters.  All too
often one must add a hyphen to fool the font into producing the desired
character.

A colleague of mine in France bought an Urdu font in India for his Mac, but
never got it to work properly.

I will forward your email to a few of my colleagues.

Best regards,

Ruth Schmidt
Dept of East European and Oriental Studies 
University of Oslo
P.O. Box 1030 Blindern
N-0315 Oslo, Norway
Phone: (47) 22 85 55 86
Fax: (47) 22 85 41 40
Email: r.l.schmidt at easteur-orient.uio.no