InPage vs Unicode: Why Your Urdu Text Breaks (and How to Fix It)

If you have ever copied a paragraph out of InPage and pasted it into Word, Facebook or an email, you know the moment. A neat Nastaliq headline turns into a line of nonsense such as ¦Ž¢¡ Š¢¦“¤¡. Nothing is wrong with your computer, and the text is not lost. Two systems for storing Urdu are simply speaking different languages.

This guide explains, without jargon, what is actually happening, why it happens, how to recognise the different kinds of broken Urdu, and how to fix each one for good.

The short answer

• InPage 2000 and 2.x store Urdu using their own private codes. Only InPage knows that a particular code means پ.
• Everything else (phones, browsers, Word, WhatsApp) uses Unicode, a worldwide standard in which every Urdu letter has one official number.
• When InPage text reaches a Unicode program, the program reads InPage’s private codes as if they were ordinary Western characters, and you see symbols.
• The fix is a conversion: translate each InPage code into the matching Unicode letter. Our InPage to Unicode converter does this in your browser, and the Unicode to InPage converter does the reverse.

What “encoding” actually means

Computers do not store letters. They store numbers. An encoding is the codebook that says which number stands for which letter. As long as the program that writes the text and the program that reads it use the same codebook, everyone is happy.

Picture two shopkeepers who write their price lists in private shorthand. Each list is perfectly clear to its owner, but swap the lists and neither can read the other’s. That is InPage and Unicode.

In the InPage codebook, the letter پ is stored as two bytes, a marker byte followed by 0x83. In Unicode, پ is the number U+067E, and every program on earth agrees on that.

When InPage puts text on the clipboard, it hands over its private codes. Windows, which does not know about them, interprets each byte with a Western code page, so 0x83 becomes the character ƒ. That is why پاکستان pasted from InPage shows as something like:

ƒœ’„ 

Some of the codes, including the marker bytes and the code for alif, are invisible control characters, which is why the garbled text looks shorter than the Urdu.

Why InPage used private codes in the first place

This is not InPage being difficult. When InPage arrived in the 1990s, there was no practical standard for Urdu on Windows, and fonts could not yet handle Nastaliq’s complex joining rules on their own. Nastaliq is one of the hardest scripts to set by computer: letters slope diagonally, stack on each other and change shape constantly.

InPage solved that with its own engine and its own encoding, paired with the famous Noori Nastaliq font. For a generation it was the only realistic way to produce newspaper-quality Urdu, which is why so many newspapers, publishers, schools and composing shops still have years of work in .inp files.

Unicode Urdu matured later. Today, Unicode fonts such as Noto Nastaliq Urdu and Jameel Noori Nastaleeq render Nastaliq directly in Word, browsers and phones. Newer InPage versions (3 and later) can work with Unicode too. The millions of older documents, though, are still in the private format.

How to recognise what kind of broken Urdu you have

Not all broken Urdu is the same problem. Matching the symptom to the cause saves a lot of trial and error.

What you see	What it is	What to do
Latin symbols such as ƒœ’„ ¦¤¡ or Ž‹¢	InPage legacy encoding	InPage to Unicode
Boxes, ????? or blanks after pasting into InPage	Unicode text sent to an old InPage	Unicode to InPage
Urdu letters, but the words read backwards	Visual-order text from a PDF	Fix Broken Urdu Text → Reverse each line
Urdu that looks right but search and word count fail	PDF “presentation forms” (letter shapes)	Fix Broken Urdu Text
ي ك ه instead of ی ک ہ, odd in Nastaliq	Arabic keyboard or Arabic font	Fix Broken Urdu Text
Random English letters from a PDF	The PDF holds drawings of letters, not text	Copy from the original InPage file, or use Urdu OCR
Correct letters shown in a plain font	A font problem, not an encoding problem	Change the font to an Urdu Nastaliq font

A quick test: copy a few words into a plain box, such as the input of our converter. If you see Western symbols with accents and curly marks, it is InPage. If you see Urdu letters in the wrong order or with odd shapes, it is a PDF or Arabic-keyboard problem.

Fixing InPage text, step by step

1. Open the document in InPage.
2. Select the text. Ctrl+A selects everything in the current text box or story.
3. Copy with Ctrl+C.
4. Open the InPage to Unicode converter, click the left box and paste with Ctrl+V.
5. The Unicode Urdu appears on the right. Anything the converter did not recognise is highlighted in yellow rather than deleted.
6. Press Copy, then paste into Word, Google Docs, your CMS or WhatsApp.

For long documents, work story by story or page by page. The converter itself handles 100,000+ characters at once, so the only limit is what InPage lets you select. Our guide on moving Urdu from InPage to Word, WhatsApp and websites covers each destination in detail, including fonts and right-to-left settings.

What a good conversion includes

A careful converter does more than swap codes one by one:

• Composite letters. آ, أ and ؤ are stored in InPage as a base letter plus a modifier and must become single Unicode characters.
• Hamza by position. InPage has one hamza glyph. Unicode Urdu uses ئ inside a word (جائے، مسئلہ) and ء at the end (شعراء). A converter that ignores this produces text that looks right but does not search correctly.
• The right Urdu letters. Unicode has separate code points for Urdu ی، ک، ہ and Arabic ي، ك، ه. Correct Urdu output uses the Urdu ones.
• Normalisation. Combining marks (zabar, zer, pesh, shadd) are put in the standard order so that identical words are stored identically.
• Nothing lost silently. Unknown codes should be kept and flagged, never dropped.

Going the other way: Unicode into InPage

The reverse problem is just as common in composing shops: a reporter sends a story typed on a phone, and the page must be made in InPage 2000. Pasting Unicode into older InPage gives question marks or empty boxes.

The Unicode to InPage converter rewrites Unicode Urdu in InPage’s codes. Copy its output and paste into an InPage text box in Urdu mode. Because both of our converters are generated from the same character table, text survives the round trip unchanged.

It is not always the encoding: fonts matter too

Encoding decides which letters are stored. The font decides how they look. Many “broken Urdu” complaints are really font complaints:

• Word shows converted Urdu in a Naskh or Arial-style font. Select the text and choose an installed Nastaliq font, then set the paragraph to right-to-left.
• Facebook and WhatsApp choose their own Urdu font. You cannot force Nastaliq inside these apps, but the letters are correct.
• On websites, set lang="ur" and dir="rtl" on Urdu content and specify a Nastaliq web font such as Noto Nastaliq Urdu.

If the letters are right but the style is wrong, change the font. Do not run the text through a converter again, because converting text that is already Unicode can only damage it. Our converter detects this and refuses to change text that is already Unicode.

Future-proofing your Urdu archive

If you or your organisation holds years of .inp files, plan a gradual migration:

1. Keep the originals. Never overwrite .inp files. They hold layout and formatting that plain text cannot.
2. Convert the text to Unicode as you need it, and save it as .docx or UTF-8 .txt next to the original.
3. Proofread a sample of each batch, especially pages with poetry, special symbols or decorative fonts.
4. Name files consistently, for example 2009-03-14_editorial_unicode.docx, so text and original can be matched later.
5. Store Unicode text in searchable systems. Once text is Unicode, Windows search, Google Drive and websites can index it, so your archive stops being a black box.

Key takeaways

• InPage 2000/2.x and Unicode use different codebooks for the same Urdu letters.
• Symbols such as ƒœ’„ mean InPage text; reversed or odd-shaped Urdu usually means a PDF.
• Convert rather than retype. It is faster and avoids typing errors.
• After converting, fix fonts and right-to-left settings in the destination.
• Keep your originals, and move your archive to Unicode over time.