The two-half problem

Typing Sindhi or Pashto comfortably needs two things, and people usually fix only the first:

1. A keyboard layout that can produce the language's extra letters. 2. A font that actually contains those letters.

Get the keyboard right but the font wrong, and you see boxes (fd) where ٻ ڃ ڏ should be. Get the font right but the keyboard wrong, and you simply cannot type half your alphabet. You need both — and they are independent choices.

The letters at stake

Beyond the Arabic core alphabet, each language adds its own:

• Sindhi adds the most: ٻ ڀ ٺ ټ ٿ ٽ ڃ ڄ ڏ ڊ ڍ ڙ ڳ ڱ ڻ — a large extension set, which is why so many "Arabic" fonts fail Sindhi outright. • Pashto adds ړ ږ ښ ځ څ ګ ڼ ې ۍ and more. • Urdu (Shahmukhi) adds ٹ ڈ ڑ ں ے چ پ گ — fewer, but still enough to break naive fonts.

When we tested every font hosted on this site against these sets — letter by letter, reading the character table inside each font file — the pass rate for Sindhi and Pashto was far below the pass rate for Arabic or Urdu. The full results are public: the language coverage benchmark .

Turning the keyboards on

Windows 10/11 ships both layouts: Settings → Time & Language → Language & region → Add a language → Sindhi (Pakistan) or Pashto (Afghanistan) . Switch layouts with Win + Space . The Sindhi keyboard follows the standard Pakistan-government layout; the Pashto one follows the Afghan standard.

macOS : System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources → + → add Sindhi or Pashto. Switch with the input menu or Ctrl + Space .

Android : install Google's Gboard, then System → Languages & input → Languages → Add keyboard . Sindhi and Pashto are both offered.

Linux (IBus) : ibus-setup → Input Method → Add — select Sindhi or Pashto from the list.

For Urdu speakers transitioning: the Pakistani Urdu phonetic layout shares key positions with the Sindhi layout far more than with the Arabic one — muscle memory transfers.

Fonts that pass the letter test

From the benchmark results, reliable full-coverage choices include:

• Lateef — SIL's scholarly face, built with Sindhi as a first-class target; enormous coverage. • Harmattan — SIL's West-African-Arabic-script face whose extension sets happen to make it excellent for Sindhi body text. • Scheherazade New — the widest character coverage in the collection; if a letter exists in any Arabic-script language, Scheherazade probably has it. • Noto Naskh Arabic and Noto Sans Arabic — Google's maintained families cover Pashto's additions well. • For Sindhi display work, the MB Sindhi faces hosted here ( MB Lateefi , MB Agha Sabir ) carry the community-standard letterforms.

The 30-second pre-flight check

Before you commit a font to a project:

1. Open its page on this site. 2. Paste a sentence with your language's rarest letters (for Sindhi, something containing ٻ ڃ ڏ ڳ ڻ). 3. Watch the live preview: every letter rendered from the actual file — no boxes means you are safe.

Or skip to the coverage benchmark and see every font that passes your language in one table, with the exact missing letters listed for the near-misses.

Sending documents to others

You typed it, you can see it — but the person you send it to may not have your font. For Word and InDesign files, embed the font in the document (Word: File → Options → Save → Embed fonts). For PDFs, fonts are embedded automatically at export — another reason PDF remains the safe hand-off format for Sindhi and Pashto documents. For plain text (email, WhatsApp), it is the reader's font that matters — which is why Unicode, not any particular font, is the real guarantee: the letters are standard, and any modern device has at least one font that renders them.