Urdu character picker 10

Notes:

Quick start: (You must have JavaScript enabled.) Choose a view (see below). Click on characters/shapes to insert text into the output field or use your keyboard for Latin characters, delete, etc. You can also add codepoints and escapes via the "Add codepoint" field (hit return to add to the output field).; Then cut & paste the result to your document, or use the tabs to get further information about the characters. You can also paste text into the output field to get information about it. Use the yellow box to set preferences or search (regular expressions allowed - for example, to find the letter GA, enter \bga\b, or the short form :ga:).

About the chart: Includes characters in the Unicode Arabic block used for Urdu. Most of the characters in the Urdu standard UZT 1.01 are included.; All text is output in Unicode normalisation form NFC by default. You can change to NFD or no normalisation by clicking on the buttons in the yellow area. Note that normalization only takes place when you click on a character - text pasted into the box won't be normalised until you click on another character above, or click on a button in the yellow area. (Note: normalization is turned off for Han characters in this application.)
Alternative views: The following alternative views are available by clicking just below the page title. You can start up directly in one of the views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, default, shape, transcription or fontgrid.; Default This view is likely to be more useful to people who are somewhat familiar with the alphabet and characters of Urdu. Top left are the letters of the alphabet, in the standard order. Other commonly used letters appear below. To their right, from top to bottom, we have combining vowel characters, symbols, digits and punctuation. There are also a number of Unicode control characters for managing direction of text. (Note that for HTML you should use markup, where possible, rather than RLE, LRE, PDF, RLO and LRO.); Shape This view is purely based around shape, and is therefore good when you don't know the script well at all, or for shapes you don't know. Characters are grouped and ordered by visual similarity. It is, however, very difficult to provide adequate shape-based lookup for cursive nastaliq and non-nastaliq text, and this view doesn't try to be exhaustive.; Each orange key near the top of the page represents a significant part of the shape of two or more characters; as you mouse over the keys, characters and combinations of characters that incorporate that shape are displayed below. Click on these characters to add them to the output. Within a group I attempted to put easily confusable characters close to each other.; The shapes below the grey line are a mixed bag of characters that didn't fit elsewhere.; The last orange shape to the right shows all combining characters. The shapes just to the left of that group characters by the dots or other marks that appear around them. (This may help in transcribing some of the cursive forms.); Anorange plus sign to the right of a set of shapes is followed by characters that don't quite fit the current shape group, but may cause confusion because they share elements, or because their shape may be similar, though not quite the same.; Transcription I use this for typing in text for which I have a transcription, or for creating phonemic transcriptions.; The large characters on a grey background represent characters used for Urdu transcription in both the Library of Congress scheme and Teach Yourself Urdu by David Matthews and Mohamed Kasim Dalvi. To type Urdu text starting from a transcription, click on these characters. If there is only one Urdu character corresponding to the transcription letter, it is inserted directly into the output field. If there are multiple alternatives, these are presented to you in a selection list: click on the Urdu character you need in the selection list and it is added to the output.; Each Urdu character is associated with a phonetic symbol (a Latin/IPA symbol on white background to its left in the selection lists). If there is more than one possible phonic representation you will see the selection list divided appropriately. As you select characters, the phonetic symbol to its left is stored. If you click on the Phonemes button, below the output area, these are all added to the output. This provides a quick way of generating a phonetic transcription from a Latin transcription. In some cases an Urdu character is repeated within the same selection list because it has more than one possible phonetic equivalent - in such cases, choose the right one if you want to generate this phonetic transcription.; The vowels to the left of the first line of vowels produce no output, but allow you to capture phones for creating a phonemic transcription. Vowels to their right list non-pointed characters. The vowels on the line below are for creating fully-vowelled text. Often these will need to be used with alef, he or ayin - in which case, look for those characters under 'silent' in the list of consonants above.; There are two selectors for shadda/tašdīd. One inserts a tašdīd in the Urdu text and doubles the last character in the phoneme buffer; the other just doubles the character at the end of the phoneme buffer. There is no mechanism to automatically deal with Arabic definite article pronunciation, where the first sound of the following word is doubled. You will need to manually work with that.; Just above the output area there is a line of Latin characters. This represents the union of all transcription and phonetic characters, and is provided in case you wish to just type in a transcription directly.; For less common characters, switch to the Alphabetic view.; As you mouse over the Latin characters on the grey background, the corresponding Urdu characters are also displayed near the top of the page. This is to aid in searching, but you can also select characters from there.; Font grid Shows characters in Unicode order, using whatever font is specified in the Font list or Custom font input fields. This allows comparison of fonts (especially useful in IE, which shows if a glyph is missing from a font).
Other commands: Phonemes While you click on Urdu characters in the Transcription view, the picker automatically records in a buffer the associated phonemic character to the left of each character you click on. Clicking on the Phonemes tab will dump those characters into the output area at the current cursor position, and clear the buffer. It is quite basic (for example, it doesn't take into account use of the delete key), but is offered as a way of speeding up text entry where you want to type both the Urdu characters and the phonemic transcription.; As mentioned above, graphics are provided for unwritten vowel sounds to help produce these transcriptions. They produce no output in Urdu script, but the phonemic value is stored in the buffer.; Other info For further information about features of the tool or user interface, see How to use..
Useful URIs: Downloadable TrueType and OpenType fonts: Wazu Japan, Alan Wood; Urdu script notes; Arabic in UniView; Other pickers
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