There may exist a bias towards Jameel Noori Nastaleeq due to the mere-exposure effect.There may be some non-native respondents in the survey. The participants may not be ‘experts’ in Urdu.No example of readable or unreadable text was given. No formal definition of ‘readability’ was provided.(In other words, don’t cite this survey in your research, the experiment settings have oversights).

This survey can be taken as a starting point but please use the results of this survey only as a crude quantifiable measure of font preferences. I couldn’t find any published research on readability of Urdu fonts on the web. Results: Out of the 281 responses recorded, 55% preferred Jameel Noori Nastaleeq while 24% thought Alvi Nastaleeq was more readable.

Votes were collected over a period of 8 months.

An online survey was created in a ‘blind’ setting and the voting link was shared over social networks.

6 such boxes were created, one for each font.

For normalization, the text was formatted to fit in a box covering approximately half of an A4 page (about 12 lines, single spaced) and font point size was adjusted accordingly.

Top 500 ligatures (by frequency) from a corpus of 19.3 million words were selected and concatenated to form a paragraph of text.

Arial (Unicode) was added as the 6th font.

5 prevalent Urdu Nastaleeq fonts were selected.

The data below is from a small survey I carried out in order to learn about font preferences of Urdu readers on the Internet.

Update: These stats were updated on Aug 4, 2015 Tl dr – A survey I carried out shows that 55% of the respondents considered Jameel Noori Nastaleeq to be the most readable out of six commonly used Urdu fonts on the web.

Jameel noori nastaleeq urdu fonts