A closed map, suddenly open
For most of its digital history, Nastaliq was made by outsiders or locked inside products: Monotype in 1981, Concept Software's InPage in 1994, Microsoft in 2012, Google's commissions in 2014 and 2019. Pakistani designers used their script; they rarely got to ship its typefaces.
Between 2021 and 2026, that changed. A wave of free and open Nastaliq families — most of them Pakistani — arrived in five years, and the centre of gravity moved. Our research archive added them as first-class families with full provenance; here is the tour.
Beaconhouse Nastaliq: the first fully-Pakistani open Nastaliq
Released 4 August 2026 under the SIL Open Font License, Beaconhouse Nastaliq is — by our records — the first open-source Urdu Nastaliq typeface engineered entirely in Pakistan . Its source repository is public; its 611-glyph character-based build puts it squarely in the modern engineering camp we describe in the ligature-vs-character explainer.
The symbolic weight is hard to overstate: the script's heart, finally cut at home, in the open, for anyone to fork.
The independents: Bunyaad, Naqsh, Naqsh Display
• Bunyaad — Rawaz Hamid's free Nastaliq (2021), released free for web and app use and adopted by designers precisely because licensing was unambiguous. • Naqsh — the same designer's 2024 follow-up; note the naming minefield: this Naqsh has nothing to do with PakType's Naskh-face PakType Naqsh or with… • Naqsh Display — Hoor Zubair's free 2026 display Nastaliq, a third unrelated "Naqsh". (Name conflation is one of the two systematic errors we found in AI-generated type history — see the cross-verification story.)
The experimenters: Tawazun and the commercial line
Tawazun (Folkloristan, 2026) takes a Bauhaus-inspired geometric angle on the tradition — proof that the style can absorb design languages far from calligraphy.
Meanwhile Mehr Type — already known to readers of this site through Mehr Nastaliq Web — built out a commercial line: Farda (2024, Farwa Ali's thesis project), Marzi (2025) and the deliberately futuristic Amin Sci-Fi (2025). A domestic commercial ecosystem is itself a first: Pakistani retail Nastaliq that isn't a bootleg mirror.
What the wave changes
1. Licensing clarity. Open licences end the "free of charge in practice" ambiguity that haunts Jameel Noori Nastaleeq. 2. A local talent pipeline. Open repositories mean the next engineer learns from Pakistani sources, not reverse-engineered binaries. 3. Real choice. For the first time, a designer can pick between an open Pakistani Nastaliq, a Google-commissioned one (Noto, Gulzar), and a domestic commercial family — on merit.
What to watch next
The gaps our archive tracks openly: multi-weight Nastaliq (Iwan Type in Egypt already ships seven-weight families — Wathiq, Diwan — while most Pakistani faces remain single-weight), kashida automation, and Urdu UI cuts tuned for phone screens.
The full records — dates, designers, licences, sources — for every family named here are in the Nastaliq Research Archive, and every font page carries its provenance in full. The wave is documented; join it.
Family records: rtlfonts.com Nastaliq Research Archive, database v1.4.0 (coverage to 2026-11-04).