Thank you for your comment. You are actually at the right place for your questions. The problem is that none of us is using OS X at the moment (I think, at least). We can still give it a try. You should have the Urdu Naskh Asiatype font installed on your system. If you can properly view BBC’s Urdu web site, the font is already on your system.

You are probably using the Safari browser. You can give it a try by navigating to the test page. I have tried to make the Urdu Editor a pure HTML/JavaScript based solution. Tell us about your experiences.

Regards,

1. Type the characters using Unicode hex codes after activating Unicode Hex Input Keyboard.
2. Type the characters using some independent keyboard, may be an online one like Nabeel suggested.

1. Create an Urdu keyboard layout using utilities such as this or this.

   Since I don’t use a Mac (and I think none of us here do), I can’t be of more help. We would like you to help us by writing up instructions about reading/writing Urdu on the Mac platform here as well as on our Urdu Wiki.

Nabeel: Thank you for directing me to the test page for the editor. It works quite well, although it doesn’t seem to have the letters “pay” , “zayn”, and “ghayn”. It’s also inconsistent about when it uses the medial “hay” as a “doe-chashmi” (like in Bhatti) and when it uses it as a hooke (like in “bohat zyada”). I’m mentioning this just by means of helping you refine it since I got the impression you’re still working on it. I haven’t tried to type into it and then copy-paste into another application yet, but when I do, I’ll let you know how that works. Thank you again for your help.

Zakriya: Thank you very much for all those options. I enabled the Unicode Hex Input Keyboard, but couldn’t figure out what to do after that (I haven’t read the manual, so I’ll figure it out later! I don’t really know what Unicode Hex vaghera actually means or does, so… ) . I did investigate the various Unicode glyphs that are in my computer and on the resource pages you directed me too. Some of them join well (such as the medial “hay” in “bohat”) and some of them don’t (such as the medial medial “ttay” as in “banttay” [marbles] or the final position “noon ghunnan” [like in “hain”, “jayein” etc]). So I’m not sure what to do, besides see if I can build a keyboard that will join all the letters that need to join. As I said, I will definitely let you know what happens.

It is good to know that the Urdu Editor works on OS X, more or less. With some perseverance you can even make it work properly. The Urdu Editor has an extremely simple design. It is based on the mapping of ASCII-characters to Unicode letters. This mapping is stored in the codes array. The letter peh is mapped to small letter ‘p’ whereas dochashmi hay is mapped to small letter ‘h’.
.
codes[‘p’]=0×067E; // peh
.
.
codes[‘h’]=0×06BE; // dochashmi hay

I looked up the Unicode codes using windows’ character table utility. Now if you can somehow look up the Unicode-based codes of e.g. peh and dochashmi hay and then accordingly adjust the mapping in the codes array, this should solve your problem. Let us know if it finally works.

Maybe we should ask them to release TrueType versions also. The problem is that curlp seems defunct for quite sometime. They dont even reply the mails. The site has also not been updated.