[XeTeX] Nasta'liq fonts

[maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu]

Does anyone here have experience with Nasta'liq fonts?

We're interested in typesetting some Urdu (one word to one sentence
examples in a grammar written in English).  Urdu is usually written with a
Nasta'liq (aka Nastaleeq) version of the Perso-Arabic script.  There are
just a few Nasta'liq fonts around, including the Nafees Nasta'liq font
(from CRULP, see
http://www.crulp.org/software/localization/Fonts/nafeesNastaleeq.html) and
the Pak Nastaleeq font (from the Center of Excellence for Urdu
Informatics, available at
http://openfontlibrary.org/media/files/zahoor/211).

There is a little discussion of these fonts at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nastaleeq, mostly to the effect that the
Nafees font is "slow".  That doesn't matter to us in the context of
producing PDFs etc.  But I understand that there are other problems with
at least the Nafees font, particularly with the rendering of diacritics. 
While some of the vowel diacritics are commonly omitted in Urdu texts, for
purposes of a grammar we might want to include them, so this is an issue.

Can anyone comment on the suitability and drawbacks of these two fonts (or
other Nasta'liq fonts)?  We are interested in using them with XeTeX to
produce PDFs, although at this point MsWord might be an alternative to
XeTeX (in both cases, we're starting from XML DocBook files).

   Mike Maxwell
   CASL/ U MD