Home - Harmattan — An Ajami font designed for legibility

Harmattan — An Ajami font designed for legibility

Harmattan, named after the trade winds that blow during the dry season in West Africa, is designed in a Warsh style to suit the needs of languages using Ajami (the Arabic script) in West Africa. The font was originally designed specifically for languages in Guinea. Significant design changes have been made as the font has been extended to handle a wider variety of languages using the Arabic script. The font features are easily configurable to select regional styles of glyphs.

Harmattan is considered highly legible and has been used in mobile applications for languages in other regions of the world.

The Harmattan font family consists of four weights: Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold.

Design

Harmattan is designed in a Warsh style to suit the needs of languages using the Arabic script in West Africa. A type sample showing an inventory of some of the unusual of glyphs and features can be seen here: design type samples.

Font Features

Harmattan is an OpenType-enabled font family that supports the Ajami script. It includes a number of optional features that provide alternative rendering that might be preferable for use in some contexts. Read more about our smart font features.

Character Set Support

The Harmattan font includes nearly complete support for Unicode Arabic ranges in the BMP (excluding the Arabic Presentation Forms blocks, which are not recommended for normal use). Read more about our character set support.

Common questions

What is so special about Harmattan?

Harmattan is designed in a Warsh style to suit the needs of languages using the Arabic script in West Africa. This font is designed to work with the OpenType font technology. To take advantage of the advanced typographic capabilities of this font, you must be using applications that provide an adequate level of support for OpenType. These advanced capabilities provide access to the variant character forms used in some languages. See Smart Font Features.

I notice that Harmattan is missing a number of characters that I would like. Will you add these?

It is impossible for us to add every glyph that every person desires, but we do place a high priority on adding complete coverage of all the characters defined in Unicode for Arabic script (excluding the Arabic Presentation Forms blocks, which are not recommended for normal use). You can send us your requests, but please understand that we are unlikely to add symbols where the user base is very small, unless they have been accepted into Unicode.

See complete Harmattan - FAQ list.

Harmattan

Writing Systems Technology

Arabic script font designed for use by languages in West Africa