The Hyderabadi pioneer behind the Urdu keyboard hardware

For World Urdu Day, Ashhar Farhan spoke with Siasat.com about how the Urdu keyboard hardware he created first came to life.

Hyderabad: For over a century, Urdu publishing remained tied to manual calligraphy as complex as the language, with flowing Nastaleeq script proving difficult to digitise. Early computer rendering struggled to match traditional calligraphic standards, resulting in awkward spacing and poor print quality that publishers found unacceptable. A Hyderabadi stepped in to solve the problem.

The man was Ashhar Farhan, the creator of the Urdu keyboard hardware, now standardised across different systems. For World Urdu Day, celebrated on November 9 every year, he spoke with Siasat.com about how it first came to life.

Born to Osmania University professor of Islamic Studies Anwar Moazzam and prominent Urdu fiction writer Jeelani Baano, Farhan’s rich Urdu background played a key role in shaping his interest with the language. With his natural inclination toward technology, he merged his two interests while working as a design engineer.

In 1988, a calligrapher named Javed introduced him to a chart consisting of 150 and later 585 individual shapes of Urdu letters that could be used like “Lego-blocks” to display any Urdu ligature or word. He began working on it, starting with the first essential step: creating a system to enter Urdu into the computer. 

From handwritten calligraphy to digital Urdu typing

“I wrote a program that could display the basic Urdu letters on the computer screen in a small 8-pixel by 8-pixel box each,” he said.

Then, Farhan worked on a program that could take the keystrokes and pick the corresponding Urdu letter to show it on the screen – “a simple Urdu typewriter,” he said.

After adding controls to move around and delete text, he added capability to load and save the text as files on the disk. However, when Javed lost contact, the plan fell through, prompting Farhan to move on to other technology projects.

A separate, earlier collaboration had resulted in Farhan creating a system making it easy to update ligature rules without rewriting code. During this project, he also assigned specific entry and exit connecting points to each character shape, ensuring seamless joining between consecutive Urdu letters. 

Despite this breakthrough, obtaining high-resolution prints remained a key hurdle, as laser printers were not easily accessible during the 1980s in India.

Through an agreement with a friend, whose family business had a license to import, he got hold of an HP Laserjet II printer. Once he learned how to control laser printer graphics, he could type names or short phrases into the computer, wait a minute for processing and print them out in large letters. “When I showed it to Abba, he said we must show it to Abid Ali Khan, the editor of Siasat, India’s most respected newspaper, based out of Hyderabad.”

Introduced to Siasat

Recounting the incident, he said it was around April 1989 when, at the banquet hall of a hotel, the laser printer was demonstrated to a few people. By the end of the demonstration came a striking announcement, much unexpected for Farhan. 

“At the end of it, Abid Ali Khan cleared his throat, announced that Siasat will start using the system from August 15 of that year,” Farhan said, adding that the deadline was less than three months away.

Then came the immediate resolution that it had to be done. There was no choice and no room for delay. “I came back home, cleared a semi-finished room on top of our Mallepally house, brought in the laser printer and started to work.”

Convincing his friend, Mohammed Naimuddin, to join his endeavour, Farhan began collaborating with the Urdu typist at Siasat. A much more powerful computer than what Farhan was normally using was brought in, along with a laser printer, and by June of that year, multiple tests were being conducted at Siasat.

“By June of 1989, Siasat had placed orders for the laser printer and a more powerful 386 computer. Their Urdu typist started to train on the developing Urdu text editor. We ran tests for weeks. Each evening, he would type out a paragraph and we would review it and fix the bugs.”

System crashes and a looming deadline

Meeting the deadline came with many hurdles, as with any new idea being introduced into an existing system, Farhan said.

Building a digital publishing workflow meant tackling problems across multiple levels –hardware design, software stability, print quality and newsroom adoption.

Firstly, to establish a functional layout, Farhan had to re-evaluate where each character belonged. For instance, putting Alif in the left pinky position to match the letter “A” initially seemed logical, but proved impractical in practice. Once the layout was set, a simple text editor had to be built to manage text entry.

Their next challenge was developing custom font design software to replace AutoCAD, which is a commercial 2D or 3D computer-aided design (CAD) and a drafting software application.

Meanwhile, printing gave way to another crisis. Text printed cleanly on butter paper ended up bleeding heavily on newsprint. “By the first week of August 1989, we were pushing the prints from the laser on butter paper on the sidelines of the newsprint to see the quality of printed text. We realised that the ink bleed on the newsprint was much worse than on the high-quality paper that we used on the laser printer,” he said. 

“We had to make our fonts thinner.”

He designed during the day and waited for the prints to check for mistakes. “Sometimes, we sat till 1 am waiting, tweaking the prints,” he said.

The other problem was that the software would crash. “That meant stories would go,” he said, adding that “the entire flow of the newspaper had to change.”

Diminishing use of calligraphy

Even after tackling the challenges, getting a story published required several steps. Sub-editors sent handwritten reports, often in messy handwriting, to calligraphers, who transcribed them into beautiful script. These calligraphers were also responsible for cutting and pasting the page layouts.

“The Urdu press traditionally employed a large army of calligraphers. They not only calligraphed the news items, they also could read the quick and dirty copy of the sub-editors that was sent to their pool. Our first preference was to train them,” Farhan said.

This proved to be an issue, he said, adding that many of them were already old enough to retire. “The concepts of computers were alien to them. However, many made the effort to learn computers. We tried to keep our software very simple and easy to use, almost typewriter-like.”

With many ageing and the younger people not picking up calligraphy, the use of calligraphy itself was slowly diminishing. “Some were offered retirement, others remained for writing headlines,” he said. “I never thought of the social impact it could have.”

As software errors were being cleared, simultaneously human errors emerged. “Fast typing and time constraints prompted mistakes. That is when the new job hires came – proofreaders,” Farhan said.

Nevertheless, on the evening of August 14, Farhan said they were ready to print the first news item, which had to come out on the morning of August 15. The team entered Abid Ali Khan’s office and proposed testing the system on the district news page, since those stories arrived early and allowed enough time to revert to hand-calligraphed copy if the software failed.

“To our surprise, Abid Ali Khan insisted that the editorial would be typeset on our system. I still remember his words, ‘The editorial is the only space in the newspaper that is mine,’” he said.

The font was only 80 to 90 per cent complete when Siasat published the first editorial, thus full integration happened gradually, piece by piece, Farhan explained. Within two months, it was on its own and Farhan’s customer base grew.

“The system performed well and soon we had a large customer base that extended from Mumbai to Kolkata, Bengaluru to Jammu. These were all newspapers, large and small, that needed round-the-clock support.”

Collaboration with C-DAC

In 1994, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune approached Farhan to integrate Urdu support into iLeap, an Indian language script processor developed by Mohan Tambe. At the time, Farhan’s market was split between major publishers like the Shama group and smaller entities such as Desktop Publishing job shops, schools and madrasas that could not afford the expensive proprietary software or enterprise support.

He collaborated with C-DAC to advocate for Urdu script inclusion and standardisation in unicode, the universal international encoding standard designed to represent and display text from virtually every written language across computer systems, software and devices.

Meanwhile, larger clients had grown self-sufficient as laser printers became cheaper and trained software operators became common. Faced with this shift, Farhan chose to hand over the entire software to C-DAC and later stepped away from Urdu technology in 1999 to explore new pursuits.