Today, we are excited to release an early version of Noto Nastaliq Urdu.

Nastaliq’s rich typographic tradition presents particular challenges to computerized typography. We’ve been working over a year to solve technical and design issues for an Urdu Nastaliq (aka Nastaleeq) font. This early version is by no means complete and perfect. We expect to work closely with the community to incorporate comments and suggestions.

This preview font can be downloaded from the Noto homepage or the Noto repository, and is also available as a webfont on Google Fonts Early Access.

This is a sample web page to showcase Noto Nastaliq Urdu as a webfont. Go ahead open it. If your browser renders it correctly, you will see something like this:


Text in the image is from a poem by Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. It means “I can get another if I break it / so a clay cup trumps a grail.” This font can be challenging to the current generation of browsers and font renderers. It partially broke a few of them; we have been working with browser manufacturers to fix all those issues.

We are looking forward to your feedback and bug reports. Please contact us through https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/entry. Known issues can be found here.

Posted by Behdad Esfahbod, Software Engineer, Fonts & Text Rendering, Google Internationalization Engineering

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Posted by Andrew Ure, Communications Manager, Google Australia

(Cross-posted on the Google Australia Blog.)

Collaboration lies at the heart of Google for Work. It helps people work together and achieve great things; not just for work, but also for society.

That’s why, as Australia celebrates Mardi Gras this week, we teamed up with local nonprofit Twenty10 to raise awareness of homophobia and transphobia by creating a nationwide musical collaboration.

We went to a community day, opened a blank Google Doc, and asked people to help us write a love song. More than 1,000 people added their own lyrics, as did well-known local musicians Guy Sebastian, Megan Washington and the Jezabels.

Google volunteer Tom van Gessel collects another love song lyric

As the lyrics came through on the Doc from multiple locations and devices, Toby Martin, a local singer-songwriter, chose his favorite lyrics and turned them into a beautiful song, which he performed at the end of the day.

Watch the story of the collaboration here:

You can download the song for free on Google Play. For every time it’s downloaded until Mardi Gras ends, we’ll donate $1 to Twenty10 (up to $50,000)

As Toby sings, love is for everyone.

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