Sunday, January 08, 2012

Supporting a #font for #Arabic

When you write about the sum of all knowledge, one thing is obvious; there will be citations from the Quran. It is expected to write these exactly as they were written down originally in Arabic and yes, you may provide a translation.

There have been recent additions to the Unicode specification that enable an exact rendering of citations. There are fonts that support these latest changes and many people do not have them.

The WebFonts extension for MediaWiki is capable of using a specific font for a specific text. Therefore it is possible to make sure that any citation from the Quran is rendered well.


The Amiri font is a font that may serve us for showing citations from the Quran. It is freely licensed and it seems very much ready for use. It may even be useful as a generic font.

Making a font that is freely licensed available as a WebFont is technically easy. However, we prefer to have input from knowledgeable people, people who are part of the language community. As there are so many languages each with their own issues, we need people to organise themselves in Language Support Teams.

At this time there is one person member of the Language Support Team for the Arabic language.
Thanks,
      GerardM

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Amiri font is a beautiful looking font that should be used in writing and not just for Quran. This is a great step to introduce the beautiful Arabic typography to the web.
Kudos to Khaled Ghetas who created it.