Link on digitization of Urdu

"How to bring a language to the future" is a pretty good article about a struggle to stop technological conventions from dismantling a language and its culture.

A quote:

Part of the reason nastaʿlīq [the script used to write Urdu] ran into trouble was because the technology at the time — specifically the typewriter — was built with English in mind. Subsequently, as historian Thomas S. Mullaney notes in his book, “The Chinese Typewriter,” all other languages are seen as permutations from that norm. Hebrew is English but backward. Arabic is English backward and in cursive. Russian: English with different letters. Siamese: English with too many letters. Perhaps the only major language to escape the thumb of Latin hegemony was Chinese, a script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic, and thus had to be imagined entirely outside the box of existing technology. But nastaʿlīq, presumably not quite significant enough to send typographers back to the drawing board, remained stalled until the 1970s, its mechanical rendering nowhere close to the sweep and flourish of the handwritten script.