README
Awami Nastaliq font
===================

Thank you for your interest in the Awami Nastaliq font.
We hope you find it useful!

Awami Nastaliq is a Nastaliq-style Arabic script font supporting a wide variety of 
languages of Southwest Asia, including but not limited to Urdu. This font is aimed 
at minority language support. This makes it unique among Nastaliq fonts.

Awami means "of the people", "of the common population" or "public". 

The Awami Nastaliq font does not provide complete coverage of all the characters 
defined in Unicode for Arabic script. Because the font style is specifically 
intended for languages using the Nastaliq style of southwest Asia, the character 
set for this font is aimed at those languages.

This font makes use of state-of-the-art font technologies to support complex 
typographic issues. Font smarts have been implemented using Graphite only. We have 
no current plans to support OpenType.

Awami Nastaliq is released under the SIL Open Font License.
Awami is a trademark of SIL International.
	
See the OFL and OFL-FAQ for details of the SIL Open Font License.
See the FONTLOG for information on this and previous releases.

For further information about this font, including Unicode ranges
supported, Graphite font features and how to use them, 
and licensing, please see the documentation on the website 
(http://software.sil.org/awami) or in the documentation 
subfolder of this font package.

TIPS
====

As this font is distributed at no cost, we are unable to provide a 
commercial level of personal technical support. The font has, however, 
been through some testing on various platforms to be sure it works in most
situations. In particular, it has been tested and shown to work on Windows 7,
Windows 8 and Windows 10. Graphite capabilities have been tested on 
Graphite-supported platforms.

If you do find a problem, please do report it through the website: 
http://software.sil.org/awami/support.
We can't guarantee any direct response, but will try to fix reported bugs in
future versions. 

Many problems can be solved, or at least explained, through an understanding
of the encoding and use of the fonts. Here are some basic hints:

Encoding: 
This font is encoded according to Unicode, so your application must support
Unicode text in order to access letters. Most Windows applications provide 
basic Unicode support. For Arabic text, your application must be able to
handle Right to Left text as well as the initial, medial, final forms of each
Arabic letter. You will also need some way of entering Unicode text into your 
document.

Rendering:
This font is designed to work with the Graphite advanced font technology. 
To take advantage of the advanced typographic capabilities of this font, 
you must be using applications that provide an adequate level of support for 
Graphite. 

Keyboarding:
This font does not include any keyboarding helps or utilities. You may use the
built-in keyboards of the operating system. You may also need to install an
appropriate keyboard and input method for the characters of the language you
wish to use. If you want to enter characters that are not supported by any
system keyboard, the Keyman program (www.keyman.com) can be helpful
on Windows systems. Also available for Windows is MSKLC 
(http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/msklc.mspx). 
For other platforms, KMFL (http://kmfl.sourceforge.net/), 
XKB (http://www.x.org/wiki/XKB) or Ukelele (http://scripts.sil.org/ukelele) 
can be helpful.

If you want to enter characters that are not supported by any system
keyboard, and to access the full Unicode range, you might try charmap.exe
on Windows or, on Ubuntu or similar software, gucharmap or kcharselect.

Another method of entering some symbols is provided by a few applications such
as LibreOffice.org. They can display a glyph palette or input
dialog that shows all the glyphs (symbols) in a font and allow you to enter
them by clicking on the glyph you want.

CONTACT
========
For more information please visit the Awami Nastaliq page on SIL International's
Computers and Writing systems website: http://software.sil.org/awami

Support through the website: http://software.sil.org/awami/support




