Shekaste Nastaliq Font: A Beautiful and Unique Style of Persian Calligraphy

In an attempt to avoid the negative connotation of the term, some call it "Persian Typewriter" (, ). Nastaliq is a derivative of Naskh which is a type of Arabic cursive handwriting that has different characteristics from the regular Arabic script.

{shekaste nastaliq font}

Only released in December 2002, the Unicode Standard has many Persian, Arabic and Persian-derived Unicode characters that appear in the standard. When Nastaliq and Arabic share the same character set, the character sets are further merged. The Unicode Standard is freely available for downloading on the internet. Free Nastaliq/Persian fonts are available from SIL, The Unicode Consortium, and the Font Wizard. Unicode versions 8.0 and 9.0.

While the edges of the font are sloped and the serifs are prominent, the font's main contribution to calligraphy is its ability to write the more complex forms in the Persian alphabet with more creativity than typical Nastaliq. This is where its versatility and structural design comes into play in terms of flexibility. Shekasteh Nastaliq demonstrates a great deal of mobility and freedom in its design, while being in balance with the freedom of interpretation possible in Nastaliq. Although Nastaliq is considered to be the most famous of the Persian calligraphic styles, it is often used to write the Arabic alphabet as well.

Initially, when I created Shekasteh Nastaliq, I found out that it only supports lowercase characters. I was able to fix it by adding in the italic type styles for lowercase characters. The whole alphabet is lowercase except for letters representing SH, SH, Z, TH, and T. All other letters are lowercase as well. Some of the fonts produced by the Fontforge are using double width characters to create extra space, but they are not the same as what I have achieved. I can tell you that I have achieved better results when I have used the double width features, but they were not my initial intention. I really did my best in creating this font but, I was not expecting them to be used for everything. We are not developing something here. We are just trying to find a way to make fonts easily understandable and useful.