Pascal Zoghbi

Generating Arabic Fonts

Developing and generating Arabic fonts is not as easy and straightforward as for Latin fonts.This article will cover Encoding, Glyph and Font naming, OpenType features and other topics concerning the preparation of an Arabic font before generating it.

My Arabic Font in Fontlab.png -

When I was working on my graduation Arabic type family Massira at kabk I was asking all sorts of questions about the proper way of generating my Arabic fonts, but I was not able to get any clear answers or sometimes no answers at all. Experience from Arabic type design projects, research about Arabic fonts, sharing information with type design colleague and writing on the ATypI mailing list enabled me to gather all this information. I decided to write an article about all the technical requirements regarding Arabic fonts and make it available to all young Arabic type designers once and for all. I hope that this kind of sharing spirit to become present in all the Arabic type design community and make information available to everyone and not keep it hidden.

In order to read about all the technical terms needed for generating Arabic fonts in different font formats, please link to the articles page on my website www.29letters.com