The number that stops people

Open a modern Nastaliq font and count the glyphs: Noto Nastaliq Urdu v4.000 carries about 1,246 . Gulzar v1.000 has 817 . Beaconhouse Nastaliq needs just 611 .

Now open Faiz Lahori Nastaliq, the second-generation InPage face: 44,920 glyphs, roughly 37 MB . AlQalam Taj Nastaleeq packs 29,833 into 15 MB.

Same script. Same visual tradition. A seventy-fold difference in glyph count. That gap is not carelessness — it is two opposite philosophies of what a font is .

Strategy 1: the ligature library

The ligature approach — Noori Nastaliq's original trick — treats the font as a catalogue of pre-drawn words and word-fragments. If the cascade of ا + ل + ے has a beautiful joined form, you draw that form once and file it.

What it buys:

• Calligraphic fidelity. Every stored ligature is a hand-tuned drawing, not a composition. At text sizes, the best ligature fonts still carry an authority that's hard to match. • Legacy-app compatibility. Engine-driven ligature repertoires render in older toolchains that never understood modern shaping.

What it costs:

• Unforeseen combinations degrade. The library only knows what it knows. • File size explodes. 37 MB does not ship to a phone. The web Nastaliq story — Mehr Nastaliq Web at roughly 470 glyphs as a web-optimised build — is the counter-argument in one number. • Text is not really text. Copy-paste, search, indexing and accessibility all suffer when many glyphs map to many characters in inconsistent ways.

Strategy 2: the character cascade

The character-based approach treats the font as a system : a modest set of base glyphs plus rules — OpenType cursive attachment with entry/exit anchors, contextual substitutions, mark positioning — that compose any word live.

This is how Noto Nastaliq Urdu (designed by Patrick Giasson with Monotype's Kamal Mansour, and now maintained through Google's Noto project), Gulzar (Borna Izadpanah's design, engineered by Simon Cozens with Fez rules and the Nasta'liq Connection Editor) and Beaconhouse Nastaliq all work. None of them could exist as ligature libraries at their file sizes.

What it buys:

• Real Unicode text. Search works, copy-paste works, screen readers work. • Web and mobile viability. A few hundred KB of WOFF2 instead of megabytes. • Extensibility. Add a language's letters to the character set; the shaping rules carry them into the cascade.

What it costs:

• Engineering depth. The rules are where the difficulty went. Gulzar's 20 contextual Beh variants are doctoral-level OpenType craft. • Engine dependence. The font only cascades if the renderer honours the rules — the reason SIL's Awami Nastaliq, built on Graphite tables, shines in Firefox and LibreOffice but not in most mainstream browsers.

Why the split decides your project

Choose by consequence, not by nostalgia:

1. Publishing to print through InPage-era workflows — the ligature stack is still embedded in newspaper production, and faces like Jameel Noori Nastaleeq remain the de-facto standard. 2. Anything on the web or a phone — character-based, full stop. The CSS guide for Nastaliq on the web assumes one. 3. Searchable archives and accessibility — character-based, because ligature-heavy mapping degrades every downstream use of the text. 4. Heritage and identification work — the ligature giants are historical documents in themselves; that's why our research archive records their glyph counts, GSUB inventories and checksums.

The plot twist

Binary forensics showed the two worlds secretly interbreed. "Character-based" fonts quietly cache high-frequency ligatures; "ligature" fonts quietly compose fallbacks. And several freely-circulating downloads turned out to be restyles of a handful of bases — Nafees Nastaleeq alone seeded derivatives we could prove structurally. Before you inherit a font, check whose DNA it carries.

The full engineering tables — glyph counts, composition methods, file sizes for every documented family — are open in the Nastaliq Research Archive. For the platform story (what Apple and Google actually ship to a billion phones), read the hidden Nastaliq in your iPhone.

Figures in this article are binary-verified counts from the rtlfonts.com Nastaliq Research Archive (database v1.4.0).