Arabic Fonts

Writing Systems Technology

A range of Arabic script fonts designed for different regions of the world

Downloads

SIL’s Writing Systems Technology has created a number of fonts for use in writing Arabic script. These are listed below:

  • Scheherazade New is a Naskh-style font covering just about every need we know about in the Arabic script world.

  • Lateef is also a Naskh-style font and is an appropriate style for use in Sindhi and other languages of the southern Asia.

  • Harmattan was designed to suit the needs of languages using the Arabic script in West Africa.

  • Alkalami is designed for a special style of Arabic script used in the Kano region of Nigeria and in Niger.

  • Ruwudu is designed for a special style of Arabic script for a style of writing used in Niger, West Africa.

  • Awami Nastaliq is a Nastaliq-style font supporting a wide variety of languages of Pakistan, including but not limited to Urdu.

Supporting language development

SIL serves language communities worldwide, building their capacity for sustainable language development, by means of research, translation, training and materials development. See SIL home page.

Application Support

Since Arabic script is complex, applications must support all the special features Arabic requires. This includes supporting right-to-left behavior, positional forms of characters (isolate, initial, medial and final) as well as dynamically positioned diacritics, ligatures, or alternate glyphs. In order to understand how to use Arabic script on the computer, you can read more about the level of Arabic script support in various applications...

Comparing the fonts

Our Arabic script fonts were designed for a variety of styles and uses. Each of our fonts support a different set of Arabic script characters. The font with complete Arabic script coverage is Scheherazade. Each of the other fonts support a subset of the Arabic script. In order to understand which font would best be suited for your needs you can view a chart comparing the character sets and styles of the fonts...

Common questions

How do I get signs spanning numbers in Arabic, such as End of Ayah U+06DD ۝, to work properly with digits?

These characters are intended to enclose or hold one or more digits (including European, Arabic-Indic, and Eastern Arabic-Indic digits). Many applications are able to display these properly, just by typing the spanning signs (such as U+06DD end of ayah) before the digit(s)...

See complete Arabic Fonts - FAQ list.

See Application Support for technical details.

See Using SIL Web Fonts.

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