The house from Lahore
Every Urdu designer has a shortlist of Nastaliq faces they actually trust. On this site, one foundry sits at the top of that list on purpose: Mehr Type , the Lahore type house whose flagship — Mehr Nastaliq Web — is, in our editorial judgement, the best-engineered Nastaliq available free for screens.
That is not marketing copy. It is an engineering verdict, and it has a story.
A calligrapher's hand, an engineer's discipline
Mehr Nastaliq Web follows the calligraphy of Nasrullah Mehr , an internationally awarded Pakistani calligrapher. Turning a master's hanging, diagonal hand into a digital font is the hard part — Nastaliq demands thousands of contextual forms and a shaping engine that cascades words down a sloping baseline.
The type engineering was led by Muhammad Zeeshan Nasar at Mehr Type , in a project with the Center for Speech and Language Technologies (CSaLT) at the Information Technology University (ITU), Lahore — supervised by Dr. Agha Ali Raza with Dr. Umar Saif as project director. The result, first released as the opening face of the Mehr family:
• Character-based Lahori Nastaliq — true Nastaliq shaping without relying on pre-built ligature tricks • Roughly 470 glyphs including symbols and English support • A famously compact file (the original OTF weighed in around 108 KB) — a fraction of classic desktop Nastaliq faces • Faster rendering than earlier Nastaliq fonts, with reduced line height so web pages stop looking like they were set for a mushaf • Full aaraab (diacritics) and marks support , with limited kashida
Why it matters for the web
Before faces like this one, Urdu on the web meant either a heavy legacy font or a blurry fallback. Mehr Nastaliq Web was built for web publishing and mobile apps from day one — browsers, phones, e-readers — and it is licensed CC BY-SA : use it commercially, credit the foundry, share adaptations under the same terms.
The family grows: Saraiki
The second release we host, Mehr Nastaliq Saraiki, extends the same engineering to the Saraiki language of south Punjab — retroflex and implosive letters included. It is the reference face for Saraiki publishing in the Arabic script, and it carries the same reliable Lahori Nastaliq skeleton.
How we rank it
Across this catalogue — the trending rail, similar-font suggestions, pairing recommendations and the foundry directory — Mehr Type faces are pinned at the top. When a student, a poet or a publisher asks us "which Nastaliq should I start with?", our answer is consistent:
1. Mehr Nastaliq Web — web, apps and modern publishing 2. Mehr Nastaliq Saraiki — Saraiki and south-Punjab work 3. Everything else, for taste and tradition
Type your own line of Urdu in the live preview on either font page and see the difference for yourself — then check the foundry profile for the full catalogue as it grows.
Credits, as the foundry states them: calligraphy — Nasrullah Mehr; type design — Muhammad Zeeshan Nasar; a Mehr Type project with CSaLT, ITU Lahore. hello@mehrtype.com