You paste Urdu text into Word, a browser, or InPage, and instead of letters you get a row of boxes, question marks, or symbols that mean nothing. It looks broken. Almost always, it isn't — this is one of four specific, fixable causes, and none of them mean your text or your file is damaged.
Here's how to work out which one you're dealing with, in the order to check them.
1. You're using the wrong conversion direction
The single most common cause: pasting InPage-encoded text somewhere expecting Unicode, or the reverse.
Unicode Urdu and InPage Urdu store the same letters as completely different underlying data (we go into why in our full Unicode vs InPage guide — worth reading if you want the full picture). If you paste InPage text into a tool or field expecting Unicode, or paste Unicode text into InPage itself, the result is exactly this kind of gibberish, because the software is reading the wrong kind of data.
Fix: confirm which direction you actually need before converting — going into InPage, or coming out of it — and use the matching tab. If you're not sure which one your pasted text already is, an auto-detect tool can usually tell from the character pattern alone.
2. You don't have a matching Nastaliq font installed
If you've converted InPage text to display correctly, but it still shows as boxes or the wrong shapes in Word or your browser, this is almost always a missing font, not a bad conversion.
InPage-encoded text only renders correctly through a font built specifically for that character mapping — most commonly Jameel Noori Nastaleeq. Without that exact font installed and applied to the text, the underlying data is fine, but nothing on your system knows how to draw it as Urdu letters.
Fix: install a compatible InPage/Nastaliq font (Jameel Noori Nastaleeq is the standard) and apply it directly to that text selection. If it displays correctly after that, the conversion was never the problem.
3. The text direction wasn't set to right-to-left
Occasionally Urdu text pastes in correctly, letter for letter, but appears reversed, jumbled, or with the wrong characters running in the wrong order. This usually isn't a character-mapping issue at all — it's that the paragraph or field wasn't set to right-to-left (RTL) direction, so a script that's meant to flow right-to-left is being displayed left-to-right.
Fix: check the paragraph or text-box direction setting in whatever app you're using (Word has this under paragraph alignment/direction) and set it to right-to-left. This is a display setting, not something the conversion itself can fix, since the underlying text was already correct.
4. Your file uses a non-standard InPage font or codepage
Less common, but worth knowing: not every InPage document uses the same character mapping. The most widespread InPage encoding — the one most converters, including this one, target — covers character codes 129–254 from InPage 3 and 2009-era files. Older files, or ones built with a heavily customized keyboard layout or non-standard font, can use a slightly different mapping.
If a handful of specific characters convert incorrectly while the rest of the document looks fine, this is usually why — it isn't a sign the whole conversion failed.
Fix: a good converter will flag which specific characters it couldn't map, rather than silently guessing or dropping them, so you can check and correct just those spots by hand instead of the whole document.
Font problem or encoding problem — how to tell
If the text displays correctly in InPage itself but looks wrong everywhere else, that's a rendering/font issue (cause 2). If the letters are wrong or scrambled even inside InPage, or the software refuses to recognize the text as Urdu at all, that's an encoding issue, and needs an actual conversion, not just a font install. This is the same encoding-vs-rendering distinction that trips people up everywhere in InPage/Unicode work — a font changes how text looks; conversion changes what the text actually is, as data.
If you need to convert now
If you've worked through the above and what you actually need is to convert between Unicode and InPage properly, our free converter handles full documents directly in your browser, auto-detects which direction you need, and flags any character it can't map instead of silently getting it wrong.