Nasta'liq or Nasta'leegh (نستعلیق) is a specific style for writing in the Arabic alphabet. It is the preferred style for writing Urdu, but is mostly considered a form of calligraphic art for writing other languages, specially Persian and Ottoman Turkish. The name derives from mixing Naskh and Ta'aleeq, two other writing styles, of which Nasta'liq is a descendant.

In Iran, Nasta'liq is usually written with a somewhat thick reed pen (with a tip of about 5mm), and a special kind of carbon ink. In Pakistan, various kinds of pens and inks are used, because of the higher usage of the style.

Producing high quality Nasta'liq in print is a demanding process. For example, Monotype's attempt to implement Nasta'liq for photo composer typesetting resulted in a glyph repertoire of 20,000 different gylphs.

External links

• Free Open Type Unicode compliant fonts covering both Nasta'liq and Naskh (http://www.crulp.org)
• Free True Type font covering basic Nasta'liq (http://tabish.freeshell.org/u-font/)
• Free Nasta'liq Writer from SIL (http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_software.asp?id=32) (Macintosh only)