InPage is the desktop publishing program that has set Urdu in print for nearly three decades. Released in the mid 1990s by the UK based Concept Software, it gave Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Pashto and Sindhi publishers something they badly needed: proper Nastaleeq typesetting with full control over layout, columns and design. Walk into almost any Urdu newspaper or book publisher, and you will find InPage on the machines.
Why InPage was built differently
When InPage appeared, Unicode support for complex cursive scripts was immature. To render beautiful Nastaleeq, InPage used its own font based, glyph level encoding. Instead of storing the letter and letting the engine shape it, InPage worked closely with specific fonts where each connected shape sat at a fixed code position. The result on screen was gorgeous, and for print it was reliable.
The trade off
That design choice is exactly why InPage text does not travel well. Copy it into Word, a browser or a PDF and it turns into unreadable Latin style symbols, because the receiving program reads those codes as Unicode and gets the wrong characters. This is not a bug, it is two different systems speaking different languages. The bridge is conversion: InPage to Unicode to go digital, and Unicode to InPage to bring modern text into print.
InPage and Unicode today
Newer versions, from InPage 3 onward, added native Unicode support, which reduces the need to convert for fresh work. But the enormous archive of older InPage files, plus the many shops still running legacy versions, mean conversion remains an everyday task.