On Wed, 25 May 2011 15:27:50 -0400, Peter T. Daniels
<grammatim@...> wrote a helpful message.

Peter, thank you for the encouragement about our local Indian community.
It's not at all hard to find people from India, and they are typically
very courteous and helpful. As well, thank you for the reference and
historical note about photolith. history. Regarding typesetting of Arabic,
I suspect that there's been further progress in recent years since that
reference was published.

> I'd be surprised if typesetting in an accceptable-looking nasta`liq is
> available -- if only because words or short phrases occupy diagonal
> spaces within each right-to-left line.

New to me, because I don't know much of anything about Urdu (or Arabic
script, for that matter), but I have noticed the diagonal appearance of
parts of the script. However, typing (partly out of sequence -- embedded
postscripts (not to be confused with .eps!)) as I researched, there does
seem to be hope.
Some time ago, I read that Malayalam (I hope I remember correctly which
script!) as handwritten was modified, because in that particular stript,
almost sure an LtoR variety, letters were hand-written on occasion one
above another. That drove the typographers nuts (half-kidding), and they
apparently didn't attempt to do that. The gist of the commentary was that
in this particular instance, widespread typographic compromise resulted in
the handwritten form no longer stacking letters.

I Googled on [nasta`liq typography] (the [`] didn't bother Google) and
found many interesting hits. I looked at
<http://faiznastaliq.blog.co.in/>, which took many seconds to reply, and
did see some interesting descriptions of their products and fonts.
The page at<http://www.faiznastaliq.com/history.html> was interesting; its
left border contains some lovely examples, but there's no English text to
say whether they were typeset by this application, nor just what they
represent. The page heading probably renders "Faiz Nastaliq" in Nasta`liq
style, perhaps even using their software (it would make sense to do so!).
As well, the page about making Faiz Nasta`liq is (imho) worth reading
(30,000 ligatures recognized, before grouping similar/identical ones...)
(I'm still hoping so see what I know to be specimens.) Unfortunately, the
link to the Urdu version of the page has apparently been hijacked. :(

The Wikipedia article about InPage mentions a library of more than 20,000
ligatures. Discussing InPage history, it says, abstracted, "...Pakistan's
newspaper industry, who up until that time had been using large teams of
calligraphers to hand-write last minute corrections to text created under
Monotype's proprietary [page description language --nb] system."

When I look at some specimens on the Faiz Nasta`liq page, I'm amazed that
software could create such sophisticated text, but I know computers quite
well enough to have faith that with talent and ability, it could be done.
Reading further, it did take a lot of work, and involved talented
calligraphers.

Roughly 25 years ago (could be 20 or 30 yrs, maybe even earlier) the
earlier* Scientific American had an article about Arabic script, iirc
discussing Arabic typesetting. It had memorable specimens of the various
styles of Arabic script; I'd describe them as almost dramatically
different among each other.
*Earlier: When Scientific American's editorial intent was to inform
scientists in fields other than their own about significant work in
science. Many of its articles were classics and notably informative.
Contemporary Sci.Am. hasa very-different intent; I'm not sure just what it
is, and, sorry to say, am not in a hurry to find out.

Some years ago, I browsed the Web, looking for examples of Arabic
calligraphy, and was quite astonished, happily so at that, by the wondrous
variety and great beauty of what I found.

Best regards,

--
Nicholas Bodley _.=|*|=._ Waltham, Mass.
How Fox News Outfoxes Average Americans:
<http://preview.tinyurl.com/3kwuzal>
It's psychological warfare on the 99% of us.