science
Publishing
Intermediate
Urdu Book Viewer
A right-to-left Urdu e-book reader that paginates plain text into elegant pages — with inline song embeds, live word counts, and one-click PDF export. Hosts "Main Akeli Thi V-1."
- Category
- Publishing
- Complexity
- Intermediate
- Published
- Jul 14, 2025
- Developed By
- Abdullah Tarar
- Technologies
- urduebookreaderrtlpaginationpdf-export
About this Experiment
The Urdu Book Viewer is a client-side reading engine that turns a plain .txt manuscript into a fully paginated Urdu book in the browser. It powers the original "with songs" edition of Main Akeli Thi (V-1) by Mohsin Kamil, weaving embedded music videos into the emotional beats of the story.
Features
- Automatic pagination — the story is split into elegant page cards at paragraph boundaries, each with an Urdu page number (صفحہ).
- Special-page markers — simple tokens in the text generate a half-title page, a full title page, and a bilingual dedication page automatically.
- Inline songs —
[VIDEO]markers in the manuscript are replaced with embedded video players at exactly the right moments in the story. - Live statistics — total pages, word count (الفاظ), and character count (حروف) shown as you read.
- Multi-story support — any story file can be loaded via a URL parameter, with a welcome page listing the available titles.
- PDF export — the entire book can be downloaded as an A4 PDF, generated client-side.
Why It Matters
Urdu long-form reading on the web is usually an afterthought. This experiment treats it as the main event: right-to-left layout, Noto Nastaliq Urdu typography, and a paper-like page metaphor — no app install, no PDF viewer required.