Why your Urdu captions look wrong, and how to fix them

First, find your symptom

Naskh vs Nastaliq: why it matters

Urdu and Arabic share most of their letters, but not their usual handwriting style.

• Naskh is the standard style for Arabic. Letters sit along a flat baseline. It is what most phones and computers fall back to when they need to show Arabic-script text.
• Nastaliq is the style Urdu readers grew up with: books, newspapers, shop signs and school textbooks. Words slope down from right to left, letters stack, and the shapes change a lot depending on their neighbours.

Urdu set in Naskh is readable, but to a Pakistani viewer it looks foreign, a bit like reading English in a typewriter font in the middle of a film. For captions that people read quickly, the familiar shape helps.

Nastaliq is also harder for software. A Nastaliq font contains many context-dependent letter forms and positions them vertically as well as horizontally. That needs a text engine with full support for complex scripts. When an editor lacks it, you get broken or overlapping letters, even with the right font selected.

Fonts to use

• Noto Nastaliq Urdu: free, open licence, available from Google Fonts. A safe default.
• Gulzar: another open-licence Nastaliq font on Google Fonts, with a more calligraphic feel.
• Jameel Noori Nastaleeq: very widely used in Pakistan. It is free to download, but check its terms before using it commercially.

Install the font on your computer (or phone), restart the editor, and select it by name. If a font doesn't appear, you may have selected the zip file instead of the .ttf file inside it.

Fixing captions in Premiere Pro

1. Update Premiere Pro. Newer versions shape Urdu and Arabic text without extra settings. Older versions had a Text Engine option under Preferences > Graphics, which had to be set to South Asian and Middle Eastern. If you are on an older version and see broken letters, that setting is the first thing to check.
2. Import subtitles as UTF-8. If your SRT was made in Notepad or exported from another tool, open it and save it again with UTF-8 encoding. Garbled characters after import almost always mean the encoding is wrong.
3. Set the caption font in the caption track's style settings to your Nastaliq font. Do it once, save it as a style, and apply it to every caption.
4. Give it room. Increase the line spacing and the caption box height. Nastaliq needs roughly twice the vertical space of Latin text at the same size, so a box sized for English will clip it.
5. Set right-to-left alignment where the option exists, and check a line that mixes Urdu with an English word.
6. Check Motion Graphics templates separately. Some templates were built for Latin text and break joining when you type Urdu into them. If one does, use a plain caption or a different template.

Fixing captions in CapCut

1. Add a Nastaliq font. The built-in font list rarely includes one. On desktop, install the font on your system and restart CapCut. On mobile, recent versions let you import a font file from the text panel; the exact menu moves between versions.
2. Avoid letter-by-letter animations. Typewriter, bounce-per-letter and similar effects treat each letter as separate, which breaks Urdu joining. Animate whole words or whole lines.
3. Set letter spacing to zero. Any extra spacing pulls Urdu letters apart.
4. Check word-by-word caption styles. Highlight styles that colour one word at a time are fine if they treat a word as a unit. Play the result back and look for words that split.
5. Check the order of words in auto-generated captions. Edit any line that reads in reverse.

Subtitles on YouTube (closed captions)

When you upload an SRT file to YouTube, the viewer's player draws the subtitles, using a font chosen by the player and the viewer's device. You cannot pick Nastaliq there. Many viewers will see Naskh.

So there are two kinds of captions, and many Urdu channels use both:

Burned-in Nastaliq captions give the look; an uploaded subtitle file gives accessibility and searchable text.

Clipping: dots and tall letters cut off

Nastaliq letters reach well above and below the line. Fixes:

• Line height of about 1.8 to 2 times the font size.
• Extra padding inside any caption background or highlight pill, especially at the bottom, where the dots under letters like ب and ی sit.
• Fewer words per line. Two to four Urdu words per caption is a comfortable amount to read.

Mixed English and Urdu

Urdu scripts often include English words: brand names, scientific terms, "Black Hole". In a right-to-left line, a run of English words must stay in its own left-to-right order. Good tools handle this automatically. If yours doesn't:

• Keep English words together, without Urdu punctuation inside them.
• If punctuation at the end of a line jumps to the wrong side after an English word or a number, add a right-to-left mark (Unicode U+200F) after it.
• Consider writing common terms in Urdu script instead (بلیک ہول), which is what viewers hear anyway.

Numbers

Urdu can be written with Western digits (1947) or Urdu digits (۱۹۴۷). Both are correct, and Western digits are very common on screen. Choose one and keep it consistent, and make sure the narration reads the year the way people say it.

The quicker route: captions made for Urdu

If you'd rather not fight your editor, ContentRoof's Caption my video does this for you. Upload a clip of yourself speaking Urdu (up to 3 minutes; MP4, MOV or WebM, up to 400 MB). It is transcribed with word timing, and the captions appear word by word in Nastaliq, right to left. You can edit any word, choose the position, size and highlight colour, and small drawings pop up when you mention things. See the Urdu captions page for examples.

Checklist for Urdu captions

• The font is Nastaliq and letters join correctly.
• Words read right to left in the correct order.
• English words inside Urdu lines read correctly.
• No dots or tall letters are clipped.
• No per-letter animation or letter spacing.
• Two to four words on screen at a time.
• The SRT (if any) is UTF-8.
• Captions sit clear of the platform's buttons and text at the bottom and right.

How it works

1. Install a Nastaliq fontUse Noto Nastaliq Urdu or Gulzar (both open licence), or another Nastaliq font whose terms you've checked, and restart your editor.
2. Make sure the text is shapedUpdate your editor. In older Premiere Pro versions, set the Text Engine to South Asian and Middle Eastern.
3. Fix encoding and directionSave SRT files as UTF-8 and set right-to-left alignment. Check lines that mix Urdu and English.
4. Give Nastaliq roomRaise line height to about 1.8 to 2 and add padding so dots and tall letters aren't clipped.
5. Animate words, not lettersRemove per-letter effects and letter spacing so letters stay joined.

Questions

Updated 2026-10-28