Likhari

1. Getting started

Install Likhari from the Microsoft Store and it opens with a blank page in a tabbed editor — you can have several documents open at once. Documents are saved as .lkhdoc files, which embed your images so a document is fully self-contained and holds everything: text, formatting, styles, tables, pictures, frames, sections, page styles, headers and footers, and ruler guides. A compact document format keeps files small — even ones full of pictures — and every document saved by an older version of Likhari still opens exactly as before.

A 60-second tour

1. Pick your language keyboard in Tools → Keyboard Layout (or leave it on “Direct” to use your OS keyboard).
2. Start typing — Urdu/Pashto/Sindhi text shapes into Nastaliq as you go.
3. Use the toolbar for bold, italic, colour, font and size on the selected text.
4. Add styles, lists, columns, tables, frames and images from the menus.
5. Decorate the page with Page Styles — borders, headers/footers, mirror margins.
6. Save (Ctrl+S), then Export to PDF — what you see is what you get.

2. Keyboards & languages

Tools → Keyboard Layout opens a picker with a live on-screen keyboard preview so you can see what each key produces before you commit:

Your choice becomes the default for new documents and is shown live in the status bar. The same translation applies inside dialogs — table cells, headers/footers and Find & Replace — not just the main page.

The Keyboard layouts panel (left, under Find/Replace) is a quicker, two-way version of the same choice: OS keyboard and your selected keyboard, named after whichever layout you last picked and changeable from a dropdown right there (with a Preview… link to see a layout’s full key mapping first). Ctrl+Space flips between the two — the shortcut for typing an English name in the middle of an otherwise Urdu line without reaching for the mouse.

A named style can also carry its own keyboard layout, switched to automatically the moment the cursor enters a paragraph in that style — see Named styles.

The RTL / LTR button in the toolbar sets the document’s base direction; Urdu documents want RTL.

3. Typing Nastaliq, araabs & mixed text

As you type Urdu, Pashto, Arabic or Sindhi, letters join and stack into proper Nastaliq shapes with correct dot placement. You can freely mix right-to-left script with left-to-right English words and numbers on the same line — each runs the correct direction automatically.

Likhari ships with Noto Nastaliq Urdu and uses it by default, alongside a set of bundled Arabic-script and Latin fonts. Any Urdu or Arabic font installed on your PC appears in the font list too, and the Latin box beside it sets a separate face for Latin letters and digits — useful when your Urdu font’s Latin characters look wrong. Leave it on “same as Urdu font” to use one face for everything.

Kashida (kasheeda) justification

Set a paragraph to justified and Likhari fills each line by stretching the connecting strokes (kashida/tatweel) of the script, the way authentic Nastaliq typesetting does — rather than opening large gaps between words.

Araabs (diacritics)

The Araabs palette lists every tashkeel/diacritic mark Likhari knows — the core marks, rarer extended marks, and honorific ligatures like ﷺ — as insertable buttons; it works in body text, a table cell or a header/footer band.

On the Phonetic layout, Shift+key types many marks directly — jazm, pesh, zer, zabar, tashdeed and more — matching the real CRULP Urdu Phonetic keyboard’s Shift level. On every Urdu/Perso-Arabic layout (Phonetic, both Urdu layouts, Arabic, Pashto, Sindhi, Farsi, Punjabi/Shahmukhi, Saraiki, Balochi), AltGr+key reaches the rarer araabs and honorifics.

Seeing each font before you pick it

Every font in the list draws itself — beside each name you see that face setting a few real words, in the language your cursor is in, so you can tell a Nastaliq face from a Naskh, and one Nastaliq from another, without picking it first. The words are drawn by the same engine that sets your page, so what you see in the list is what you will get on the page. Every row shows the same words, so the list compares faces rather than scripts, and a second column shows the same face setting English — an empty cell there means the face has no English letters of its own, and you should pick something in the Latin picker instead. The same samples appear everywhere a face is chosen: both toolbar pickers, the header, footer and page-number faces in Page Styles, and each track in Paired Text Properties. If you have a very large font folder and want the lists to open as quickly as possible, turn the samples off under Tools → Show Font Samples; the setting is remembered.

Adding your own fonts

Tools → Install Fonts adds your own .ttf, .otf or .ttc files to Likhari’s font pickers — no administrator rights, and nothing changes for your other programs. Pick one or more files and they’re available immediately, and again every time you start Likhari; anything that isn’t a readable font is reported and left out. A font you add wins over a Windows font of the same name.

4. Documents, tabs & files

Likhari keeps several documents open at once as tabs across the top. Ctrl+T opens a new one, Ctrl+Tab moves to the next, Ctrl+W closes the current one. A dot beside a tab’s name means unsaved changes.

• Ctrl+S saves as .lkhdoc; Ctrl+Shift+S saves under a new name.
• File → Open Recent lists what you had open lately.
• File → Import InPage (.inp) reads InPage files — see Importing InPage files.

Closing a document with unsaved changes prompts you to save rather than silently discarding it, and if Likhari closes unexpectedly it offers to recover your work the next time it starts — see Saving, recovery & recent files.

5. The workspace — panels, rulers, guides & zoom

• Tool Windows (left) — Navigator, Find/Replace, Keyboard layouts, Araabs, Document (file, page count, word and character counts, page size), Paragraph, and Tabs. Each group collapses; toggle the whole strip with View → Tool Windows.
• Tool Palettes (right) — Styles, Table, Paragraph, Tabs, Format, and Insert & Page, as one-click icon buttons. Each group lights up when it can be used. Toggle with View → Tool Palettes.
• Rulers — View → Horizontal Ruler and Vertical Ruler. The horizontal ruler shows your margins, indent markers and the current paragraph’s tab stops — drag the indent markers or tab stops directly on it and the text reflows as you drag.
• Guides — non-printing lines you drag off either ruler onto the page, for lining things up. View → Show Guides, Lock Guides and Clear Guides control them; see Ruler guides.
• Zoom — Ctrl+plus / Ctrl+minus, Ctrl+0 for 100%, or the slider at the bottom right. Zoom magnifies the page from 25% to 400% and never changes the document.
• Moving through the document — there’s a scrollbar down the right of the page (it disappears when the whole document already fits), the mouse wheel, and Page Up / Page Down, which move the cursor a screenful at a time and bring the view with them. The ◀ ▶ arrows beside the page number in the status bar step a page at a time; unlike scrolling, they move the cursor to that page, so you can carry on typing where you’ve landed.
• The selection bar — click in the margin on the side your lines start from (the right margin in an Urdu or Arabic document, the left in a Latin one) to select that whole line, and drag up or down to extend the selection a line at a time. Easier than landing precisely on a line’s first or last character, especially at small zoom.

The status bar shows the page you’re looking at and the total (Page 3 of 12), the word and character counts, and your current keyboard layout. The Paragraph and Tabs panels always describe the paragraph the cursor is in, and follow it as you move around. Every panel remembers whether it was open between sessions, and each sits in its own bordered card so the tool windows and tool palettes are easy to tell apart at a glance.

6. Formatting text

Select text first, or set the formatting and carry on typing — a choice made with nothing selected applies to the text you type next.

• Bold (Ctrl+B), Italic (Ctrl+I), Underline (Ctrl+U).
• Format → Decoration — underline, double underline, overline, or Box, Pattern (grey fill) and Reverse (white on black).
• Format → Outline — hollow letters.
• Format → Text Color — a full picker: a saturation/brightness plate, a hue strip, R/G/B spinners you can type into directly, a hex box, a row of presets, and a row of your recently-used colours. Every colour picker in Likhari — text colour, cell fill, paragraph borders/shading, page borders — is this same one.
• Format → Character — letter spacing, horizontal scale, and baseline shift (for superscripts, subscripts, or nudging a line of Latin text onto the Urdu baseline).

7. Paragraphs

Format → Paragraph, or the Paragraph tool window, controls the paragraph the cursor is in (or every paragraph the selection touches):

• Alignment — natural, left, centre, right, justify, or forced justify.
• Indents — a first-line indent (a negative value gives a hanging indent), and two indents that follow the reading direction: left/right in a left-to-right document, or Before text / After text in a right-to-left one, where “before” is the edge the text starts from. These can also be dragged directly on the horizontal ruler.
• Spacing — before and after the paragraph, line spacing, and an exact line height in points. These work inside a table cell as well as in the body text.
• Pagination — keep the paragraph together, keep it with the next one, widow and orphan control, and a forced break before it (column or page). This group is for body text only: a table cell is never split across pages, so there’s nothing inside one for these to act on.
• Borders — a rule above and/or below in a solid, dashed, dotted or double line, with its own width and colour (the same full colour picker as everywhere else). Each rule can span the paragraph’s indents or hug just its text.
• Background — its own Back tab in the Paragraph palette. Fill the paragraph with a flat colour or a picture (stretched or fit, with an opacity setting for the picture), and choose how wide the fill runs: To indents, To text, or Follow border — which ties it to whatever the rules above and below are doing, and is how it behaves if you never touch the setting. Because the fill and the rules are set separately, a paragraph can carry a rule that hugs its text over a colour that runs the full measure.

Ctrl+J toggles justification for the whole document.

8. Tab stops

Tab stops belong to a paragraph, and there are two ways to set them:

• On the ruler — click in the lower band of the horizontal ruler to add a stop, drag it to move it (the text reflows as you drag), and drag it off the ruler to delete it. Stops snap to 1/16″.
• In the Tabs tool window — type an exact position in inches and Add, or select one and Remove. Clear removes them all.

Press Tab to move to the next stop — this is how you line up columns of figures without a table. In right-to-left documents, stops are measured from the right margin inward, which is how InPage measures them too, so imported documents line up.

A tab stop can also carry a leader — the character that fills the gap the tab jumps over — set from the Tabs tool window or by dragging a stop on the ruler: None, Dot, Dash, or Underscore. It draws on screen and in PDF exports and is saved with the document. A Table of Contents uses a dot leader by default — see Table of Contents & Navigator.

9. Lists

Likhari has three kinds of list — bulleted, numbered and checklist — each nestable up to nine levels deep. Bullets and checkboxes are drawn shapes, not typed characters, so they render correctly in Nastaliq and every other face, including ones with no bullet glyph of their own.

Bulleted lists

Format → Bulleted List, or the bullet button on the Format palette, turns the current paragraph (or every selected paragraph) into a list. Enter adds the next item; to stop, put the cursor on the empty last line and turn the same button off again.

Bullets nested four levels or deeper cycle through six shapes automatically — disc, ring, square, diamond, triangle, dash — so a deeply nested outline stays easy to read at a glance. To pick a specific shape yourself, click the small arrow beside the bullet button on the Format palette for a quick picker, or use the Lists tab below.

Numbered lists

Format → Numbered List, or the numbered-list button on the palette. Enter continues it, and the numbers renumber themselves as you add, remove or reorder items. By default they are plain 1, 2, 3… — Urdu digits (۱، ۲، ۳) automatically if the paragraph reads right-to-left, Western digits if it reads left-to-right, exactly as ordinary typed digits would be. The small arrow beside the numbered-list button is a quick picker for the other formats; start-at, restart and the Multilevel preset live on the Lists tab.

Checklists

Format → Checklist, or the checklist button on the palette. Click directly on a checkbox in the text to check or uncheck that item — this doesn’t move the cursor or disturb a selection, so you can tick things off without losing your place. You can also put the cursor on the item and press Ctrl+K (or Format → Toggle Checked). Enter adds the next item, and it always starts unchecked — even if you press Enter in the middle of a checked item’s text.

Nesting, and moving items in and out

Tab at the very start of an item’s text nests it a level deeper; Shift+Tab moves it back out. (Anywhere else in a line, Tab types a real tab.) Format → Increase / Decrease List Level do the same thing from the menu, for when the cursor isn’t at the start of the line.

A list works the same way inside a table cell too, numbered independently within that cell — see Tables.

The Lists tab — every setting in one place

Format → Paragraph → Lists gathers every list setting, and the right-hand tool panel has a matching List tab that applies live, with no OK button. Reach for either when the buttons above aren’t specific enough:

• Kind — Not a list, Bullet, Number or Checklist.
• Level — the nesting depth; the same thing Tab / Shift+Tab set from the keyboard.
• Bullet shape — a picker showing each shape. Automatic (the default) cycles by level as described above; choosing a specific shape pins that item to it regardless of level.
• Format — how a numbered item’s ordinal is written (see the table below).
• Start at / Restart numbering here — begin a list, or a level within one, at a chosen number, or force it to restart even though the same kind of list is continuing from above.

10. Named styles

Format → Styles manages named styles — a set of paragraph and character formatting you can apply by name.

• Apply a style to the current paragraphs.
• New creates one from the current paragraph — the quickest way to build a style is to format a paragraph until it looks right, then save it.
• Redefine a style from the paragraph the cursor is in.
• Next style — the style a new paragraph gets when you press Enter at the end of one using this style. Set two styles to name each other (say, “Ayah” and “Translation”) and alternating paragraphs take care of themselves as you type them.
• Keyboard — a keyboard layout that switches on automatically the moment the cursor enters a paragraph in this style, so a verse in one language and its translation in another can each type in their own layout without touching Tools → Keyboard Layout or Ctrl+Space.
• Outline level — marks a style as Body text or as a heading at Level 1, 2 or 3. It changes nothing about how the text looks; it’s read only by the Table of Contents and the Navigator, so any style — not just the built-in Heading 1/2/3 — can feed either.
• Save as Default Styles — makes the current set of styles the starting point for every new, unsaved document from then on. A document opened from disk keeps its own saved styles regardless.

A quicker way to apply a style day-to-day: the Styles palette on the right sidebar names whichever style the cursor is standing in, in a dropdown of the document’s styles, with an Apply button and a Set up… button that opens this same Format → Styles window.

11. Table of Contents & Navigator

Insert → Table of Contents builds one automatically from every heading in the document — any paragraph whose style has an outline level (see Named styles), which includes the built-in Heading 1/2/3 styles seeded into every document — listed with its page number and indented per level. The options window opens every time you insert or update one:

• Which heading levels to include — 1, 2 or 3.
• The leader before each page number — a dot (the default), a dash, an underline, or none.
• Whether to print page numbers at all.

Re-running Insert → Table of Contents on an existing one regenerates it in place using whatever options it already had, rather than resetting to defaults — it’s generate-on-demand, like Word’s F9, not something that stays live-tracked as you edit. Heading 1/2/3 paragraphs inside inline table cells are picked up too; headings in floating or appended-page tables are not.

The Navigator, a collapsible tool window at the top of the left sidebar, shows the same outline — document, sections and headings, each with its page number — as a tree you can click to jump the caret straight to that spot. It rebuilds itself automatically, a moment after you stop typing.

12. Page setup & page styles

File → Page Setup sets the page size, portrait or landscape, and all four margins — one decision for the whole document, or for one section of it (see Sections). Turn on Mirror Margins, on the Margins tab, for a bound book: the left and right margins swap on alternate pages, so the wider one always falls at the spine, and the writing stays the same width.

Format → Columns flows the body text into newspaper-style columns with a configurable gutter. In a right-to-left document, column one is the rightmost. Apply to picks how far the change reaches:

• Whole section — the default; see Sections for documents with section breaks, where each section can carry its own column count.
• Selected text — brackets the selection: the chosen column count starts there and the count that was in force before it resumes right after, so the rest of the section is unaffected.
• From here on — sets the count starting at the cursor, with no automatic restore.

The latter two are how one page carries plain text at the top and a multi-column story below it — a masthead over a newspaper layout, for instance — without a section break. Gutter is a whole-section setting, so it’s unavailable for the other two scopes.

File → Page Styles is where everything that decorates a page lives, in one window. Pick which pages you’re working on at the top — every page, the first page on its own, left and right pages separately, or, with the cursor inside a section, this section — and the rest of the window follows:

• Header and footer wording — or drop them altogether, what a title page usually wants (the page number goes too) — and space reserved at the top for a chapter-opening headpiece, with the writing starting below it.
• A rule under the header or over the footer, its own width and colour, with an optional tinted strip behind the band.
• A page border — line style, colour, thickness, how far in from the paper’s edge it sits, how much air to leave before the writing, which of the four edges carry it, and whether it’s on every page, the first page only, or every page but the first. The writing moves in to clear the border by itself — you never work the margins out to match.
• A background — a flat colour, or a picture. Fill picks which: Colour opens the same colour picker used everywhere else in Likhari; Picture is a full-page image (below). The two are exclusive — choosing one clears the other.
• A picture as a border or background — choose any picture; a PNG with a see-through middle is how decorative Urdu and Islamic borders usually come. Likhari finds the clear space in the middle of it and sets the writing in to fit, each of the four sides on its own, so a deep سرلوح across the top doesn’t push the sides in too. Every measurement can be adjusted afterwards, with a button to measure again. Choose how the picture meets the page — fill it, fit it keeping its shape, keep the corners crisp and stretch only the edges, or repeat a pattern round the edges — fade it, mirror it on facing pages, and put it on every page or just the first. The picture travels inside the document, so sharing the file shares the border with it.

Headers and footers are typed right on the page, not in a dialog box. Double-click into the header or footer margin, type, and format the words there — bold, italic, colour, size — the same way you’d edit text inside a table cell. Esc, or a click in the body text, leaves it again. A letterhead, logo or ornament can sit in the band too, independent of whatever text is there.

Insert → Header & Footer opens the same window, on Every page, with the header ready to type into — and is also where the page number itself is set up:

• Where it goes — header or footer, and left, centred or right within it.
• Which numerals — ۱ ۲ ۳ (Urdu), ١ ٢ ٣ (Arabic), 1 2 3, i ii iii, I II III, a b c, or A B C.
• Its own font, size and colour, separate from the band around it — so an Urdu document can carry Urdu page numbers while the footer stays in another face.
• Optionally “page X of Y” rather than the number alone.

13. Sections

A section is a run of the document with its own page size, orientation, margins and page numbering, independent of the rest of the document — a landscape page for one wide table in an otherwise portrait document, or a title page with its own look before the first chapter.

Insert → Section Break (Next Page) starts a new section at the cursor, on a fresh page. From that point on, File → Page Setup and File → Page Styles apply to whichever section the cursor is currently in — Page Styles’ “Apply to” offers This section once there’s more than one, alongside Whole document, which is what every document without a section break uses throughout.

File → Section Setup reopens a section’s page size, margins, columns, gutter and page-number-restart fields any time after creation — including the document’s own leading section, which previously couldn’t be revisited this way. It’s the same dialog the palette’s Section Setup button opens.

A floating picture, floating table, or frame belongs to the section it was placed in — it stays on a page in that section and its position is measured from that section’s own start, rather than the whole document’s.

14. Frames

A frame is a box holding some of your paragraphs, positioned on the page, with the rest of the text wrapping around it — a pull quote, a notice, a sidebar.

Two ways to make one:

• An empty frame, drawn where you want it — Insert → Frame (empty) (also Frames → Insert Empty Frame), then drag out a box anywhere on the page. Click without dragging for a default-sized one. The cursor lands inside the new box, so you can type straight away.
• From text you already have — put the cursor in the paragraphs you want boxed and choose Frames → Frame Selected Paragraphs. The frame appears beside the text it came from.

A frame drawn by hand keeps the size you drew it at, rather than shrinking to fit what you type; switch Grow with Text on if you’d rather it followed the text.

The text inside a frame is ordinary document text. Click in it and type; format it, search it, undo in it, export it — exactly as anywhere else. That is the whole point of a frame, and the difference between it and a page-layout program’s text boxes. Paragraph formatting works in there too, borders and shading included.

Two different borders, set in two different places. Frames → Frame Border draws a box round the frame itself. Format → Paragraph → Borders draws rules and shading round the paragraphs inside it. A frame can have both, one, or neither. A frame with no border of its own still shows a faint dashed outline on screen so you can find it — that outline is never printed or exported.

To move or resize it: click the frame’s border to select it, then drag the border to move it or a handle to resize. Clicking inside the frame puts the cursor in the text instead, so you can always type. Esc drops the selection.

Backspacing an empty frame away. Once you’ve deleted the last character in a frame, one more Backspace dissolves the box: its (now empty) paragraph joins the one before it and the cursor carries on there, exactly as Backspace at the start of any paragraph behaves. The words around it are untouched — only the box goes.

Frames and mid-page columns: a frame placed among the plain paragraphs before a Format → Columns → From here on / Selected text switch works normally, columns and all. A frame placed inside the multi-column part itself is a combination Likhari doesn’t yet position reliably, so that part of the page falls back to a single column rather than risk putting the frame on the wrong page.

15. Tables

Table → Insert Table asks for rows and columns. Click into a cell to type; Tab moves to the next cell, Shift+Tab to the previous, and Esc leaves the table for the body text. A contextual toolbar appears whenever the cursor is in a cell, gathering the table actions in one place:

• Insert / delete rows and columns around the current cell — the cell contents, fills, formatting and merged spans are carried across the reshape.
• Merge Cell Right / Left and Split Cell — for headings that span columns (direction respects right-to-left tables).
• Cell Fill — a background colour for the current cell, and each cell border can be set individually.
• Column Widths — relative widths for the whole table, and a table can be given a width and sit against a margin or centred rather than filling the page.
• Row Heights — a minimum height per row, in inches. Leave a row blank for automatic, which is how every row starts: as tall as whatever is in it. A row never shrinks below its own text, so a value smaller than the text needs simply leaves that row alone — nothing can be hidden by it.
• Cell Vertical Alignment — Top, Middle or Bottom for the cell the cursor is in (also on the table toolbar as V-Top / V-Mid / V-Bottom). This only has something to do when the row is taller than that cell’s text: either because another cell in the same row holds more lines, or because you gave the row a height of its own. In a row where every cell is a single line, all three look the same.

A cell takes the same paragraph formatting the body text does — alignment, indents, line spacing, space before and after, borders and shading, bulleted or numbered lists, tab stops, and named styles — not just bold, italic and colour. Format it exactly as you would a body paragraph while the cursor is in the cell; a numbered list inside a cell counts from 1 within that cell, independent of anything else in the document.

Each cell keeps its own character formatting too — including its own font. Select text in a cell and pick from either toolbar font picker (Urdu or Latin) and only that text changes; the rest of the table keeps the font it had.

Tables can sit inline in the text or float with text wrapping around them, and a table taller than a page breaks between rows and continues on the next. A floating table can now be dragged and resized, the same way a floating image can: a small handle just outside its top-left corner selects it (also reachable by clicking into any of its cells) — drag the handle to reposition it, or an edge handle to change its width. It can also be turned on its side, a quarter-turn either way or upside down, for a wide table on an upright page; everything in it turns with it, and the writing flows around wherever it ends up.

16. Images

Insert → Image picks an image, embeds it in the document, and opens a placement dialog:

• Inline — the image sits in the text like a very large letter and moves as the text moves; Backspace/Delete removes it like a character.
• Floating — the image sits at a fixed position with text wrapping around its left or right side, or running behind it.

Click a floating image to select it and eight handles appear: drag the picture to move it, a corner to resize it keeping its proportions, or an edge to stretch one side — the text rewraps as you go. Insert → Edit Image sets the same things numerically, and Delete removes the selected picture. A floating picture may sit out in the margin, but it can’t be dragged so far off the page that there’s nothing left to grab.

An inline image can be resized too. Click it to select it, the same way a floating image works, then drag a handle — or use Insert → Edit Image for an exact width and height. Its top is fixed by the surrounding text and it stays centred in its column, so only 5 of the usual 8 handles apply: the side handles stretch it symmetrically about its centre, matching how it always draws.

Cutting a picture to a shape

The Image dialog’s Shape box cuts a picture to an oval, triangle, diamond, pentagon, hexagon, star or arch instead of leaving it a plain rectangle. It works on an inline picture as well as a floating one, and on a picture placed in a header or footer band. Wrap to the shape, alongside None, Square and Top and bottom, is a floating picture’s fourth wrap choice: text follows the outline of the shape you picked as it passes, standing closer where the shape narrows and further off where it widens, instead of keeping a straight edge down the picture’s whole box. It follows the shape, not the outline of the photo inside it — with no shape chosen, it wraps exactly as Square does.

Distance from text, also in the Image dialog, sets the gap kept between a picture and the surrounding text for both Square wrap and Wrap to the shape — it used to be a fixed 6pt with nothing to adjust. Changing it on a picture already in your document leaves everything else exactly where it was; nothing you have already written reflows.

A picture used as a page border or background, rather than sitting in the body text, is set up from File → Page Styles instead — see Page setup & page styles.

17. Shapes

Insert → Shapes draws a line, an oval, or a rectangle (square or round-cornered) directly on the page. Unlike a picture, a shape never wraps or reflows the text — it floats freely and can sit anywhere, including right on top of running text, so a box can frame a paragraph or a rule can cross a heading.

• Line and Rectangle are the general tools — hold Shift while dragging to snap a line to horizontal, vertical or diagonal, or to keep a rectangle a perfect square.
• Vertical Line and Square are dedicated tools that always come out constrained — no need to hold Shift at all.
• Oval drags out freely; hold Shift for a perfect circle.

To draw one: pick it from the menu, then drag out its box on the page — the drag itself is the insertion, there’s no dialog first. A plain click with no drag places a sensibly-sized default you can resize afterwards.

Click a placed shape to select it: eight handles appear, the same as a picture’s. Drag to move it, a handle to resize it. Double-click a shape, or Insert → Edit Shape, opens its settings:

• Border — none, or a style (solid, dashed, dotted, double), width and colour.
• Fill — none, or a flat colour (a Line has no fill, having no area to fill).
• Corner radius — a rectangle only; 0 is a plain rectangle.
• In front of the text, or behind it — in front sits on top of whatever’s underneath, including the text; behind lets the text show through on top of the shape.

Delete removes the selected shape.

18. Ruler guides

A guide is a non-printing line you drag onto the page to help line things up — it never appears in an export or a printout, only on screen.

• Create one by dragging from either ruler onto the page: from the top ruler for a vertical guide, from the side ruler for a horizontal one. It only takes hold once you’ve pulled it clear of the ruler onto the page — release while still on the ruler and nothing is created.
• Move one by dragging it again from the ruler — a small dot on the ruler marks where each guide crosses it.
• Delete one by dragging it back off the ruler, the same way you’d drag a tab stop off to remove it.
• Dragging a floating picture or floating table, or one of their resize handles, snaps to nearby guides, the page margins, and the page’s own centre line.
• View → Show Guides, Lock Guides (stops guides being created, moved or deleted by accident) and Clear Guides (removes every guide from the document) round it out.

Guides are saved with the document, so they’re still there next time you open it — but moving one is not undoable. Treat them as a workspace aid, not part of what the document says.

19. Find & Replace

Ctrl+F opens Find/Replace in the tool-window strip and puts the cursor in it. Type what you’re looking for and press Find to step through the matches, or Replace / Replace All. Match case is off by default. Searching understands Urdu text as typed, so you don’t need to worry about how letters are shaped on screen.

20. Spell check

Misspelled words get a red wavy underline as you type. It all happens on your own machine — nothing is uploaded, and no account or internet connection is involved. Urdu, Arabic and Persian use dictionaries built into Likhari; English uses the one Windows already has.

Right-click an underlined word for a list of suggestions. Click one to replace the word, or use:

• Add to Dictionary — you know the word is right (a name, a technical term). It stops being underlined, in this and every future document.
• Ignore — leave it alone for now. Applies until you close Likhari.

Underlines never appear in a PDF, a printout or an exported picture — they are only ever on screen. Spell check works in the document body, inside table cells, and in headers and footers while you’re editing one; a mistake in a header is marked on every page that header appears on.

The Spell-Check language panel

The Spell-Check tool window (left) names the dictionary checking whatever your cursor is standing in — and, just as importantly, why. “Urdu (document default)” means the text is following the document’s own language and will change if that does; a plain “Urdu” means the text was set to that language on purpose and won’t follow the document. A mixed selection reads “Mixed”. Pick a language from the panel and apply it to the Selection — or, with nothing selected, to what you type next — or to the whole Paragraph.

Telling Likhari which language a passage is

Urdu, Arabic and Persian share the same letters, so Likhari can’t tell them apart by looking. If it checks Arabic verse against the Urdu dictionary, every word comes back “wrong”. There are three places to say what a passage is, and the most specific one always wins:

1. A selection. Use the Spell-Check panel above, or right-click anywhere in the text and choose Set Language — Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Don’t check, or Default (Document Setting) to go back to following the document. Right-click now offers this on any text, correctly spelled or not, not only on a word already flagged as wrong — reach for it when quoting Arabic inside Urdu prose.
2. A named style. In Format → Styles, a style can carry its own spell-check language — give a style like “Ayah” the language Arabic and every paragraph using it is checked as Arabic without tagging anything by hand. See Named styles.
3. The whole document. The picker in the toolbar, beside the RTL/LTR button, sets what the document’s own script is checked against — Urdu, Arabic, Persian, or None. Its tooltip now reads “Document’s Language”, a reminder that — unlike the two overrides above — it always applies to the whole document.

A language switched off in Tools → Spell Check Languages (below) drops out of both this list and the Spell-Check panel — except in a document already set to it, which keeps showing that language rather than being silently rewritten. English words are always checked as English wherever they appear, so an English name in the middle of an Urdu line is spell-checked properly rather than underlined for being English.

Turning it off

View → Spell Check switches all underlining off. Tools → Spell Check Languages has a checkbox per language — Urdu, Arabic, Persian, English — so you can silence just one, useful if you write mostly Urdu with the occasional Persian line and would rather not see the Persian marked at all. This setting moved here from the View menu, since which dictionaries are in use is a proofing choice rather than a way of looking at the document; View keeps only the master on/off switch. New installs start with Urdu and English checked, and Arabic and Persian switched off — if you upgraded from an earlier version, your own settings are unchanged.

21. Paired text

For a verse with its translation directly beneath it, line for line — a Quranic ayah with its tarjuma, a hadith with its translation, a Persian couplet with an Urdu rendering, a bilingual textbook.

Insert → Paired Text asks how many tracks you want: two for a source and its translation, three or four to add a transliteration or a second language — Arabic verse, transliteration, Urdu and English is a real four-track edition. The number is fixed once the block is made; to change it, dissolve the block and insert a new one. A block appears as a stack of bordered boxes, and each row shows one line from every track.

Typing in it

Click any box and type — that is all there is to switching tracks, there is no mode to enter. Each track is ordinary text and behaves like it:

• It wraps on its own. When a line gets too long it continues in the same track on the next row, so a long verse stays a verse.
• Enter breaks the paragraph in the track you’re in and nowhere else — a new row appears with the other tracks’ boxes empty, ready to click into.
• Tab moves to the next track, Up/Down move within your own track, Esc leaves the block for the body text.
• Ctrl+Z works across tracks: type a verse, click down to its translation, type that, and Undo walks back through both.

Making it look right

The quickest way is a style per track. Set up an “Ayah” style and a “Tarjuma” style (see Named styles), then open Insert → Paired Text Properties and give each track its own. Every paragraph in that track takes the style’s font, size and weight — and if the style names a keyboard layout, clicking between tracks switches your keyboard with it. The same dialog also sets each track’s font, size and ink directly, and the block’s own border style, width and colour. Dissolve turns the block back into ordinary paragraphs — verse, then its translation, then the next verse — losing nothing but the pairing itself.

What else works

Blocks sit in the text like anything else, so ordinary paragraphs can come before and after, and one document can hold as many as you like. A block longer than a page breaks between rows, with every track continuing together on the next page. Spell check works inside every track, and it exports to PDF exactly as it looks on screen.

22. Importing InPage files

File → Import InPage (.inp) opens InPage documents directly. Likhari reads:

• text and its formatting — font, size, bold, colour, per run;
• paragraph formatting, alignment, indents, line height, and tab stops;
• tables, including per-cell borders, fills, column widths and merged cells;
• pictures;
• page setup and margins;
• the file’s own font table, so fonts map to what you have installed;
• the running header and footer from the master page.

23. Exporting & printing

File → Export writes a PDF or PNG that matches the screen exactly — the same columns, tables (including tables split across pages), inline and floating images, frames, per-character formatting, page borders and backgrounds, and header/footer bands with page numbers. Ruler guides never appear in an export or printout — they’re a screen-only aid. To print, export a PDF and print that from your PDF reader; because the PDF comes from the same layout as the screen, the printed page matches.

24. Free vs Pro

Likhari is free to use — the entire word processor is unlocked, in every language, with no time limit. The free tier marks the pages themselves: a faint “Free version of Likhari” watermark across each page on the diagonal, which you see while you write as well as in exported and printed pages, and a small “Created with Likhari” line along the bottom of exported files. A one-time Pro purchase removes both.

Help → Upgrade to Pro, or the ★ Upgrade to Pro button on the toolbar, buys the Pro add-on from the Microsoft Store and removes both marks immediately — on screen and in output alike, with no restart. Pro is a one-time purchase (not a subscription); it’s tied to your Microsoft account and follows you to any PC you sign in on. Once Pro is on, the ★ button leaves the toolbar; the Help menu entry stays, and confirms you already own it if you use it again.

25. Saving, recovery & recent files

• Save / Save As (Ctrl+S / Ctrl+Shift+S) writes a self-contained .lkhdoc (text, formatting, styles, tables, images, frames, columns, sections, page styles and guides).
• File → Open Recent lists what you had open lately.
• Unsaved-changes warning — closing a tab or the window prompts you to save any document with unsaved edits.
• Crash recovery — open documents are snapshotted periodically; after an unexpected close, the next launch offers to recover them.

Your keyboard choice, recent-files list and view settings are remembered automatically between sessions on the same PC. Documents are saved only wherever you choose to put them — Likhari never stores a copy of your work anywhere else.

26. Keyboard shortcuts

27. Troubleshooting

• Typing produces English instead of Urdu/Pashto/Sindhi. Pick the right layout in Tools → Keyboard Layout or the Keyboard layouts panel — “Direct” passes your keystrokes straight through with no translation.
• A dialog (table/header/find) types in English. Dialog boxes follow the active document’s keyboard — set the layout on the document first.
• Choosing a font, size or colour didn’t change my selected text. Select the text first; with nothing selected, the choice applies to the text you type next.
• A picture border or background didn’t move my writing at all. Likhari couldn’t find any clear space in the middle of the picture to fit the writing into — choose a picture with a genuinely transparent or empty centre, or adjust the margins by hand afterwards.
• A floating image, table, shape or frame landed in the wrong place. Drag it by its border/handles — it snaps to nearby ruler guides, the margins and the page centre — or use Edit Image/Edit Table/Edit Shape to reposition numerically. Moving one is undoable, so Ctrl+Z takes back a whole drag in one step.
• A small empty box appeared in the text. It’s a leftover anchor marker from an inline table or picture that has since gone — usually in an older file, or one that has been through another program. Put the cursor after it and press Backspace.
• Applying columns changed more (or less) of the document than I meant. Check Apply to in Format → Columns — Whole section, Selected text, or From here on — see Page setup & page styles.
• My page (or export) shows a watermark. That’s the free tier’s diagonal “Free version of Likhari” mark, seen on screen as well as in exports and prints, plus a “Created with Likhari” line on exports — the one-time Pro unlock removes both everywhere.