I gained a considerable amount of experience working with LaTeX while I was completing my PhD. The thought immediately struck me that LaTeX was perfect for type-setting Urdu text because of the high demands for formatting that is required.
Turns out computer enthusiasts were way ahead of me. With the advent of XeTeX which brought unicode support to LaTeX and the bidi Tex-package which allows for bi-directional text (essential since Urdu is written from right to left) it is now possible to create beautiful urdu documents (pdfs), both prose and poetry, using LaTeX.
I have created a tutorial that explains how to do this in Ubuntu.
For samples of this technique:
nasr (prose)
nazm (poetry)
