Here comes a new friend
Friends!
Couple of days past I received an email from this guy Qadeer Ahmed Rana that he liked our efforts and that he would get back to us soon. Now I received an email where he says:
I have completed the main file of phpBB and half of faq file, for translation. I hope it will be completed in one or two days InshaAllah. This is very hard to Type.And please tell me how can I join your group. I have recently written an article on Blogging on Blogger and one on Urdu Fonts, which you can see on my blog.
More, I have some suggestion. I am thinking about templates, as you wrote in your blog. I am thinking that either some General StyleSheet be made which may comply with all of the Blogger’s templates, or We should modify the Templates of Blogger, for Urdu. But the second thing will lead to Piracy, so I think the First one is good. Another thing is that we make our own templates.
Please give me some advice. If I get positive response, I will try to make a general stylesheet or a general template which would be fit for all the colours.ALLAH Hafiz
QADEER AHMAD RANA
It feels so good to see how people are joining hands with us in this noble cause. I welcome this fellow on behalf of all of us at UrduBlog, and UrduWiki. Qadeer! if you like to be an author on this blog, please let us know through comment or email, and we will create an account for you. For your questions regarding Blogger, I request the attention of concerned colleagues.
February 10th, 2005 at 5:07 am
زکریا میں چاہتا ہوں کہ ہم لوگ اس بلاگ کے دائیں طرف سب سے اوپر مندرجہ ذیل یا اس سے ملتا جلتا مضمون لکھ دیں:
توجہ فرمائیں
1۔ آپ اپنے کمپیوٹر پر اردو لکھنا/پڑھنا چاہتے ہیں؟
2۔ آپ انٹرنیٹ پر اردو میں بلاگ لکھنا چاہتے ہیں؟
3۔ جاننا چاہتے ہیں کہ انٹرنیٹ پر اردو میں کیا ہو رہا ہے؟
اس نوعیت کے تمام سوالات کے جوابات کیلئے اردو وکی پر تشریف لائیں۔
February 10th, 2005 at 8:23 am
Zack: Thanks for updating the template. Urdu text looked a bit large to me so I tried to decrease it by writing a class “link-note-urdu” in the stylesheet but that doesnt solve, as the *.lang(ur) and lang:ur directives force !important on font-size. Could you solve it?
February 10th, 2005 at 8:51 am
Asif: I haven’t found a satisfactory solution to that problem. What I want is for the Urdu text to be somewhat larger in font size than its English counterpart because otherwise it is difficult to read the Urdu. So I used relative font sizes in *.lang(ur). However, that results in blockquoted Urdu text, for example, to get large. The further the nesting, the larger the text would become. Not acceptable! So now I am forcing all Urdu text to be medium-sized, which as you point out is too big for the sidebar.
I don’t want to write separate Urdu CSS classes to replace all the general ones. What else could be a solution? Any ideas?
February 10th, 2005 at 9:30 am
Dear Asif and fellow bloggers
I have also been communicating with Qadeer. He seems to have gathered
valuable experience in the field of web programming. We have all
talked about starting an effort to translate phpBB forum system.
Qadeer claims he is already half way through. He also says it is a lot
of typing work.
Qadeer also seems willing to let others join in his effort. I
therefore suggest that we set up a project space where we can
collaborate on this project. Setting up a project on sourceforge.net
would be an overkill in my opinion since most of the work consists in
translation. The rest adaptation requires manipulation of CSS
stylesheets and php code. I assume this should be quite similar to the
adaptation carried out by Asif for UrduWiki. I recently came across a
website for tamil version of phpBB. It looks like they have divided work by simly
distributing translation work to different people. This website also
monitors the progress of work on individual modules. I think a simple
geocities.com like or a yahoo group should suffice for such team work.
I keenly await your feedback on this proposal.
Regards,
Nabeel
February 10th, 2005 at 12:30 pm
Zack: I looked at the things. I feel that div can solve much of our problems. In the list, then we dont need to put “ur” tag for each (list) item, as you can see now. Also I moved the font definition out to the “sidebar” from “li” so that only in “ur” you need to change the font.
This gives us our required effect because everything in the div will get scaled from the top level instead of absolutely which would be the case if had you put this definition on per item basis.
I feel if you now use relative scaling in “ur” and remove important identifier, things would look normal, inshaAllah. But as far as divs are used and no mention of “ur” on the contained items is given.
Once its done, you may remove my “link-note-urdu” on behalf of “link-note”.
February 10th, 2005 at 5:06 pm
Hi folks,
) could be used for this purpose. But more importantly, I think we need to provide a mirror site for this and other resources such as Urdu Keyboard layout managers et al. Since Asif bhai and my host is same, so I would like others to think about it.
I am little late or what, but I have just managed to write my first-ever urdu writing in last 4 years and despite its frank ugly look, I hope my future urdu posts would be more taregeted towards normal urdu readers who’ve never, like me, may be, explored the joy or reading and writing urdu online. But a short and quick message for you would always be ready through emails most probably regarding whatever technical stuff I needed to discuss with you since my blog seems little too odd for that.
Anyways, I have been working on this or that thing and still need to get in touch with this team at LUMS who could give me the documentation of this Urdu research project. I have been experiencing frustrating moments regarding every font available in one way or another. The anti-aliasing, glyphs-misproportions and different line-heights in each popular font (Urdu Asia Naskh type and Nafees family) is making it more difficult to use the old classic font:”first font”, “second font” because of the peculiar differences between both of these fonts. But because it’s still unclear which of these fonts would be more popular, so I think, we should NOT negate any or all of them and shouldn’t discourage people to use one over another. here is my wishlist and the points I am working on and I think either Asif bhai or Zack bhai should FORMALLY take hold of the “project management” seat and keep everyone updated on the macro-level while everyone would still be encouraged to continue his efforts at whatever level and pace and space he/she wants to carry on.
1- Create visual identities and banners to promote urdu fonts to be downloaded so people could use increasing urdu resources. Asif bhai’s Urdu-Installer (that’s the marketing name I am proposing to that file
2- Try and test multilingual and urdu navigational system and explore eye-movement scenarios in such systems. I have already almost finished series of 6 different templates of navigation/bulleted links which are popular in every blog and can easily be used with little modifications in every blog app.
3- Design and develope complete urdu website covering most of the webdesign principles and exploring new and unique scenarios where Urdu’d fit in.
4- Prepare tutorials comparing different Urdu Type tools, fonts and their usage in an Urdu website and more troublesome multilingual scenario where user’s mental model is expected to have little difficulty to get used to the left and right directional content and navigation and so on.
......... more to follow soon.
February 11th, 2005 at 5:04 pm
Nabeel: Thanks for your suggestion. I like it but at the same time I feel opening another place might become a bit hectic to take care of. So it would be nice if you or Qadeer could post the list of files on either UrduBlog or UrduWiki from which anyone could take up as much work as he/she likes.
Ejaz: I am glad to see your first urdu post. And yes you are right about incompatibility among urdu fonts. hmmm…project management and manager…lets hear from fellow colleagues what do they think about it. I need to think more to come up with some of my own views.
1) Visual identities and banners, I fully support but am no good at graphics…
2,3) Good research directions.
4) Already underway.
July 24th, 2005 at 1:46 am
im a beginner for Urdu and i was wondering how do i join the letters?What should they look like?Could you email me the alphabet with english alphabet and the joining
August 4th, 2005 at 1:16 am
amy: This Urdu alphabet page might be useful to you.