Different fonts for different language groups

What about Ethiopic scripts (Amharic, etc.) ?

For Pakistani languages – it makes a huge difference. The only way I can describe it is, think of the fonts that Chinese manufactures use for English instruction/User manuals. Sure it's readable, but it would be headache if it was the default English font everywhere. https://www.mslmaster.com/templates/yootheme/cache/85/chinese_fonts_hs_h...

Thank you, please exclude Sindhi from that group (as it does not use the Nastaliq calligraphy) and include Saraiki, Burushaski, Shina as well.

Please also include the following fonts in the group: DecoType Nastaleeq Urdu, Jameel Noori Nastaleeq, Alvi Lahori Nastaleeq and Noto Sans Indic Siyaq Numbers. The default external font (ie. one that should implemented site-wide if possible) should be Mehr Nastaliq Saraiki – since that seems to work for all the available letters.

For Sindhi, please use the following external font: Lateef, otherwise I don't believe it needs a group on it's own.

IranSans does not support Pakistani languages. Sure it works, but we use the Nastaliq calligraphy which IranSans is not.

IranSans is not even a free font. One should pay for it and obtain a license to use it.

"I don’t claim to have in-depth knowledge about this topic, but based on what I do know, Pashto is generally written in the Perso-Arabic script, most commonly using the Naskh style. This seems to be the standard, especially in formal and digital contexts.

I think we have pinpointed the issue now. We need a way to accommodate the needs of Urdu speakers in their struggle to keep Nastaliq alive in the digital era.

A short and relevant article:
https://multilingual.com/urdu-nastaliq-script-digitization/

A bit longer and less relevant:
https://time.com/6317817/urdu-nastaliq-digital/

Considering this, we really don't need to distinguish between Arabic and Persian. I revise my suggestion to the following two groups:

1) Nastaliq group
* Urdu
* Punjabi
* Kashmiri
* Saraiki
* Burushaski
* Shina

2) Non-Nastaliq group
* Arabic
* Arabic (Egyptian)
* Arabic (Levantine)
* Arabic (Maghrebi)
* Arabic (other varieties)
* Persian
* Persian (Dari)
* Pashto
* Balochi
* Gilaki
* Mazandarani
* Luri
* Laki
* Kurdish (Sorani)
* Kurdish (Xwarin)
* Kurdish (Gorani)
* Kurdish (Badini)
* Kurdish dialects
* Shughni
* Wakhi
* Talyshi
* Tat
* Azerbaijani (Southern)
* Old Azeri
* Qashqai
* Khalaj
* Khorasan Turkic
* Turkish (Ottoman)
* Turkish (Old Anatolian)
* Iraqi Turkmen/Turkman
* Chagatai
* Uyghur
* Sindhi

For the Nastaliq group, you can use "Noto Nastaliq Urdu"

For the Non-Nastaliq group, you can use "Noto Sans Arabic", "Noto Naskh Arabic", and "Noto Kufi Arabic"

This new suggestion is compatible with the Noto fonts project for the Arabic script. They have created four Noto fonts: three general Arabic fonts that cover 81 languages and 56 regions and another Urdu-specific font just for Urdu.
https://fonts.google.com/noto/fonts?preview.layout=grid&script=Arab

Yes! I'd say a lot too, for the specific category, they belong in the Non-Nastaliq group
I have seen many Jawi transliterations, and I've too made transcriptions of Malay into Jawi
Aside from Jawi, we actually another Arabic writing system in the Nusantaran archipelago which is used to write mostly languages from the Java island and Indonesian, which we call Pegon or Gundhul, I did mention this in a comment I've made above

It is unsuitable for Persian speakers and Iranians.

It is suitable for Urdu speakers and Pakistanis. I even dare say it is a must for Urdu. Urdu is "ideologically" tied with Nastaliq in a way that is unfathomable to others. It is part of their national pride and their struggle against both British colonialism and Hindutva. It is really distasteful to consider BBC Urdu as an example here, considering that this broadcasting company belongs to the former colonizers.

LT is a c̶o̶m̶m̶e̶r̶c̶i̶a̶l̶ ̶w̶e̶b̶s̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶b̶u̶s̶i̶n̶e̶s̶s̶e̶s̶ proprietary non-free website and like all websites hosting user-generated content should strive to please its c̶u̶s̶t̶o̶m̶e̶r̶s̶ users. So if it wants to win the hearts of Urdu speakers in Pakistan, it should use Nastaliq.

This highly informative article explains the issue pretty well:
https://restofworld.org/2021/bringing-urdu-into-the-digital-age/

In modern-day Iran, where nastaʿlīq originated, the font changed to meet the limitations of the existing technology. Over the years, Farsi slowly developed a typographical identity that worked within the constraints of the block printing press but was stylistically different enough from the Arabic naskh to feel sufficiently “Persian.” If you pick up a newspaper in Tehran today, it looks significantly different from a paper in Karachi.

Why didn’t Urdu, and Pakistan, go down a similar typographical route as Farsi did in Iran? Stubborn fidelity to nastaʿlīq aside, one reason may be the ways in which Urdu differed from other nastaʿlīq-favoring languages. One letter, “the baṛī ye (ے), is particularly influential on the look of written Urdu,” writes typographer and historian Titus Nemeth in “Arabic Type-Making in the Machine Age” (2017), “and its typographic rendering is among the most challenging design questions in an Arabic font.”

The baṛī ye, which resembles a bent elbow, produces all sorts of mechanical obstacles with regard to kerning and the placement of dots and diacritics. Baṛī ye and letters like it posed a problem that seemed so insurmountable, in fact, that, in the 1960s — mimicking Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s mission to convert Turkish script into a Latin alphabet — Pakistan’s military ruler Ayub Khan proposed officially writing Urdu in Latin letters. He was met with near-instant pushback: the nastaʿlīq script, protested local religious leaders, was an essential marker of Pakistan’s Islamic identity. Without meaningful progress in the printing process, Urdu publications in Pakistan, including dailies, continued to be written by hand well into the 1980s, armies of calligraphers scribbling furiously day and night.

I'm not going to ask for anybody's permission in my communications with LT. I disregard noises.

From what I can see, respectfully speaking, you're not a Pakistani, nor an Urdu speaker, so I don't really see why you're attempting to make a case for Pakistanis / Urdu speaker. It doesn't really concern you, and I'm not sure why you're so against Nastaliq for Pakistani languages.

Urdu is always written in Nastaliq calligraphy, and is what Urdu readers are used to. Just because certain websites haven't implemented it, doesn't mean LT can't. Other websites haven't because of a number of documented reasons, but on a site like LT, I don't see why it couldn't be specifically implemented for Pakistani languages - and that of course if it isn't too much of a burden on the admin team.

What about prioritizing "Noto Sans Arabic"?

"Noto Naskh Arabic" is a modulated ("serif") font, so the Latin letters look somewhat subpar on monitor screens. But "Noto Sans Arabic" is an unmodulated ("sans") font, so the Latin letters won't look subpar.

The terminology may be a little confusing but "Noto Sans Arabic" is also in the Naskh style.

Arabic letters do not distinguish very much between sans and serif (they almost look the same to us), but the difference is obvious in Latin letters.

Finally here are some statistics about usage and popularity according to Google Fonts which shows that "Noto Sans Arabic" is even more popular than "Noto Naskh Arabic"

Noto Naskh Arabic
39.3 million
Number of times Google Fonts API served Noto Naskh Arabic over the last week. Noto Naskh Arabic is featured in more than 7,700 websites.
https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Naskh+Arabic/about

Noto Sans Arabic
135 million
Number of times Google Fonts API served Noto Sans Arabic over the last week. Noto Sans Arabic is featured in more than 10,600 websites.
https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Arabic/about

You're going off on a tangent, so I'll refrain from commenting on this, after this.

Great, thanks for focusing on a point that I wasn't even intending on making.

I'm conversant in several languages, and can read and understand several scripts, including Cyrillic, Devanagari and Hebrew among others. That doesn't make me qualified enough to start making comments on behalf of such native speakers – which you are not.

You're talking about the digital world. It's varied. 99% of Urdu books, and textbooks, and Urdu notifications (ie. letters and what not), are written in the Nastaliq script. You are not an Urdu speaker, so you don't understand the history of implementing Nastaliq with technology. If you'd like, feel free to reach out to me and I'd be happy to send you some articles which explain just that.

I have an IT background, with a passion for linguistics and read on stuff like this as a hobby. I have yet to read an article, or source that says the reason why Nastaliq isn't opted for Urdu etc. is because of "readability and clarity". The LT admins have decided to reach out for opinions, and have happily decided to set Nastaliq for Pakistani languages (and languages which use the Nastaliq script). You can disagree with it, but it doesn't affect you. I don't understand why you feel so strong about this.

When two people are having a conversation, and you feel entitled to jump in uninvited while disregarding basic etiquette, you're the noise.

[@LT]

I believe, the best fonts for Armenian would be one of the following:

GHEA Grapalat
GHEA Mariam
Arial AM Unicode

The one that is used right now is very tiring to my eyes so that I couldn’t even finish my translation (especially on desktop, it looks very ‘condensed’).

Perhaps, Noto Sans used right now is the condensed one, but it is not really inclusive and is very tiring at least for my eyes.

Pakistani Nastaliq and Persian Nastaliq are very different.
And Persian Nastaliq is mostly used for calligraphy or arts (often containing poetry).
I have seen "The Divān of Hafez" in Nastaliq, but not sure how common it is for poetry books in general.
I think most people nowadays prefer a font with better readability.
Also, Persian Nastaliq is basically impossible to be compressed in a font! The best we got is IranNastaliq which contains entire large words as one glyph because that's how complicated Nastaliq is. And the font is about 2 megabytes, only for Persian and English!

Not sure what the best font is for poetry.
Here is a comparison of some of the best and most popular FOSS fonts:
https://rastikerdar.github.io/compare-fonts/