Nastaliq


Nastaʼlīq is one of the main calligraphic hands used in writing the Persian alphabet and the Urdu alphabet, and traditionally the predominant style in Persian calligraphy. It was developed in Iran in the 14th and 15th centuries. It is sometimes used to write Arabic language text, but its use has always been more popular in the Persian, Urdu and Turkic sphere of influence. Nastaliq remains very widely used in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India and other countries for written poetry and as a form of art.
A less elaborate version of Nastaliq serves as the preferred style for writing in Kashmiri and Urdu and it is often used alongside Naskh for Pashto. In Persian, it is used for poetry only. Nastaliq was historically used for writing Ottoman Turkish, where it was known as tâlik.
Nastaliq is the core script of the post-Sassanid Persian writing tradition and is equally important in the areas under its cultural influence. The languages of Iran, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and the Turkic Uyghur language of the Chinese province of Xinjiang, rely on Nastaliq. Under the name taʿliq, it was also beloved by Ottoman calligraphers who developed the Diwani and Ruqah styles from it.
Nastaliq is amongst the most fluid calligraphy styles for the Arabic script. It has short verticals with no serifs, and long horizontal strokes. It is written using a piece of trimmed reed with a tip of, called qalam and carbon ink, named siyahi. The nib of a qalam can be split in the middle to facilitate ink absorption.
Two important forms of Nastaliq panels are Chalipa and Siyah mashq. A Chalipa panel usually consists of four diagonal hemistiches of poetry, clearly signifying a moral, ethical or poetic concept. Siyah Mashq panels, however, communicate via composition and form, rather than content. In Siyah Mashq, repeating a few letters or words virtually inks the whole panel. The content is thus of less significance and not clearly accessible.

History

and Taʿlīq. Shekasteh Nastaliq - literally: "broken Nastaliq" - style is a development of Nastaliq.

Notable Nastaliq calligraphers

And others, including Mirza Jafar Tabrizi, Abdul Rashid Deilami, Sultan Ali Mashadi, Mir Ali Heravi, Emad Ul-Kottab, Mirza Gholam Reza Esfehani, Emadol Kotab, Yaghoot Mostasami and Darvish Abdol Majid Taleghani.
And among contemporary artists: Hassan Mirkhani, Hossein Mirkhani, Keikhosro Khoroush, Abbas Akhavein and Qolam-Hossein Amirkhani, Ali Akbar Kaveh,
Kaboli.

Etiquette

was originally used to adorn Islamic religious texts, specifically the Qurʼan, as pictorial ornaments were prohibited in sacred publications and spaces of Islam. Therefore, a sense of sacredness was always implicit in calligraphy.
A Nastaliq disciple was supposed to qualify himself spiritually for being a calligrapher, besides learning how to prepare qalam, ink, paper and, more importantly, master Nastaliq. For instance see Adab al-Mashq, a manual of penmanship attributed to Mir Emad.

Nastaliq

Shekasteh or Shekasteh Nastaliq style is a successor of Nastaliq.

Nastaliq typesetting

Nastaliq Typography first started with attempts to develop a metallic type for the script, but all such efforts failed. Fort William College developed a Nastaliq Type, which was not close enough to Nastaliq and hence was never used other than by the college library to publish its own books. The State of Hyderabad Dakan also attempted to develop a Nastaliq Typewriter but this attempt failed miserably and the file was closed with the phrase “Preparation of Nastaliq on commercial basis is impossible”. Basically, in order to develop such a metal type, thousands of pieces would be required.
Modern Nastaliq typography began with the invention of Noori Nastaleeq which was first created as a digital font in 1981 through the collaboration of Mirza Ahmad Jamil TI and Monotype Imaging.
Although this was a ground-breaking solution employing over 20,000 ligatures which provided the most beautiful results and allowed newspapers such as Pakistan's Daily Jang to use digital typesetting instead of an army of calligraphers, it suffered from two problems in the 1990s: its non-availability on standard platforms such as Windows or Mac OS, and the non-WYSIWYG nature of text entry, whereby the document had to be created by commands in Monotype's proprietary page description language.

InPage

In 1994, InPage Urdu, which is a fully functional page layout software for Windows akin to Quark XPress, was developed for Pakistan's newspaper industry by an Indian software company Concept Software Pvt Ltd. It offered the Noori Nastaliq font licensed from Monotype Corporation. This font, with its vast ligature base of over 20,000, is still used in current versions of the software for Windows. As of 2009 InPage has become Unicode based, supporting more languages, and the Faiz Lahori Nastaliq font with Kasheeda has been added to it along with compatibility with OpenType Unicode fonts. Nastaliq Kashish has been made for the first time in the history of Nastaliq Typography.

Cross platform Nastaliq fonts

For the Arabic alphabet, and many others derived from it, letters are regarded as having two or three general forms each, based on their position in the word. But the Nastaliq style uses more than three general forms for many letters, even in non-decorative documents. For example, most documents written in Urdu, which uses the Nastaliq style.