Scheherazade New, named after the heroine of the classic Arabian Nights tale, is designed in a similar style to traditional typefaces such as Monotype Naskh, extended to cover the Unicode Arabic repertoire through Unicode 14.0.
Design
Scheherazade New provides a “simplified” rendering of Arabic script, using basic connecting glyphs but not including a wide variety of additional ligatures or contextual alternates (only the required lam-alef ligatures). A type sample showing an inventory of some of the unusual of glyphs and features can be seen here: design type samples.
Scheherazade New also includes a Bold typeface.
Font Features
This font uses state-of-the-art OpenType and Graphite font technologies, including variant glyphs for a number of characters for use in particular contexts. Read more about our smart font features.
Character Set Support
Scheherazade New includes full support for Unicode 14.0 Arabic ranges (excluding the Arabic Presentation Forms blocks, which are not recommended for normal use). Read more about our character set support.
Common questions
Why the name change? Why is this now called Scheherazade New?
Scheherazade has been around for many years. Over the years people have complained about the small size of the font in comparison to other fonts. We have completely resized the glyphs in Scheherazade New. If we had kept the same name, the layout of all existing documents would be affected. Thus, this name change allows users to keep using Scheherazade for older documents, but they can begin using Scheherazade New for new documents.
What is so special about Scheherazade New?
This font is designed to work with two advanced font technologies, Graphite and OpenType. To take advantage of the advanced typographic capabilities of this font, you must be using applications that provide an adequate level of support for Graphite or OpenType. These advanced capabilities provide access to the variant character forms used in some languages.