Zeropoint.IT contribution into OpenType

At ZeroPoint.IT we have a team of professional software engineers with diverse backgrounds and skill sets with a proven track record of problem solving. One of our team members, Mohsin Hijazee, worked on the OpenType standard for complex scripts in the past and developed a complex character based Nasta'liq font for Urdu and Persian languages.

Nasta'liq is a very complex script to automate because a single character can not only take 20+ shapes but its vertical position in the word also varies depending upon where it lies. Many attempts to tackle this were not usable due to the fact that the number of contextual shapes (1000+) and rules (100+) were too much to be rendered by text rendering engines like Uniscribe and Pango. Through deep analysis of 200+ MB of Urdu/Farsi Unicode text to identify the patterns and frequent ligatures with help of programs written in C++ and Python, Mohsin succeeded in substantially reducing the number or contextual shapes and rules. The resulting font (named Pak Nasta'liq) has 198 contextual shapes an only 2 joining rules by taking leverage of advanced OpenType features and was officialy released by the Government of Pakistan.

Due to its dependency on advanced typographic features, Pango, an Open Source library for laying out and rendering of text was yet unable to render it correctly. In release 1.26 however, Pango implemented those features and became able to render Pak Nasta'liq. As a demonstration of the capabilities of their OpenType rendering engine, Mohsin's font is showcased in their script gallery!