When Urdu was declared as the
national language of the independent Pakistan in 1947, a variety of keyboard designs were quickly brought into the market by various individuals and organizations. However, differences remained in the order of the keys and the number of characters. This underscored an urgent need for a standard form of keyboard adaptable for diverse users. backup to select the shape of the character appropriate to the context, and the ability to store multiple language
character sets. These issues were addressed through the standardization of keyboard.
Fourth generation In 1998 National Language Authority, under Dr.
Attash Durrani's supervision started working on a research and development project to standardize the Urdu encoding. This resulted in the formation of () (UZT). In July 2000, UZT 1.01 was standardized for all kinds of electronic computing, communications, and storage. Based on this version, Urdu language support was incorporated into the Versions 3.1 and 4.0 of
Unicode. The Keyboard version 1 was finalized by NLA on December 14, 1999. In 2001, the
National Database and Registration Authority of Pakistan fully adopted this keyboard for Data Entry operations of the
Computerized National Identity Cards.
Phonetic Keyboard Along with the UZT keyboards, phonetic keyboards have been developed for Urdu. Phonetic keyboards works with the sound of the words, e.g. 'a' button of the English keyboard contain an Urdu word which is similar to the sound of 'a' and same is the case for other characters. Though less common in the past, phonetic keyboards have seen wider use recently. CRULP (Center for Research for Urdu Language Processing) has been working on phonetic keyboard designs for Urdu and other local languages of Pakistan. Their Urdu Phonetic Keyboard Layout v1.1 for Windows is widely used and considered as a standard for typing Urdu on the Microsoft platform. However it has not been adopted by Microsoft for any Windows platform. ==See also==