Govt to develop Pakistan’s first Digital Urdu Dictionary

Digital Urdu Dictionary is planned to be built in Pakistan by Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

Urdu is our national language but to our dismay it is not the official language.

The institutes use English as medium of education and all the document work in offices is in English. To promote the Urdu language and preserve it. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has planned to launch Urdu digital dictionary.

No doubt Urdu lughat is available in the market but it is not efficient. The digital dictionary is going to be built adding the smallest word of Urdu and its meaning.

It is a project of worth 208 million. The IT Ministry will help to develop the software in the first phase. The first phase can cost up to 10 millions.

According to the buzz the digital Urdu dictionary will launch in November 2018, most probably.

A senior official of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting said,

“The current government is trying its best for the improvement and preservation of Urdu language. The government has also devised a comprehensive strategy to achieve the aforementioned objectives.”

People of Pakistan are trying to promote their national language as recently a calligrapher and his son launched in page system under name of “Mehr-e-Nastaleeq.

It will have to develop a  new font because the fonts that have already been launched in market can not be used as standard fonts for internet.

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Nasrullah Mehr and Zeeshan Mehr, father and son by relation; have launched a new Urdu font for internet. Both are calligraphers by profession. The new urdu font is named, “Mehr-e-Nastaleeq“. It took them a total of ten years to bring this font to internet.

The father, Nasrullah Mehr is an award winning calligrapher and he is associated with calligraphy for 30 years now. His work is published in magazines, books and newspapers. Due to fast growing internet his business was not able to do well.

The son, Zeeshan Mehr; then decided to join computer programming. He was also associated with family business. He aimed to develop a new refined font for internet users.

The Vice Chancellor of Information Technology University, Dr. Umar Saif and Dr. Agha Ali Raza who is linguistic technology expert ay ITU’s Center for Speech and Language Technologies (CSaLT) laboratory helped Zeeshan to achieve his goals.

Open Type Font technology has been used by Mehr-e-Nastaleeq. This is an advanced technology that allows better and efficient typesetting features that include:

• small caps
• alternates
• ligatures

and also other inside the font rather than separate expert set fonts.

It is supported by Microsoft Windows, UNIX, Linux, and Android among other operating systems. It has about 450 glyphs that include symbols and English support.

It also allows electronic communication and web publishing. This means it can work on Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Safari without requiring a separate plug-in. It will be just like writing on in page Urdu.

The developers got Mehr-e-Nastaleeq licensed by US based non-profit Creative Commons as well.

Urdu Font Features:

We are listing down some of the features specific to this font:

• Fast rendering speed as compared to other Nastaliq fonts.
• OTF Font file size is amazingly reduced up to 104 kb only.
• Best look according to National Calligraphic Standards.
• Open Type, character based, Lahori Nastaliq Font.
• Aaraab and marks support.
• Limited Kashida support.
• Reduced line height.

View a sample of this font here.

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