What are my "web font" choices for Arabic?

html fonts arabic webfonts
donut picture donut · Aug 25, 2011 · Viewed 34.3k times · Source

I am working on a WordPress site that will be entirely in Arabic (except for the backend). I am an English speaker and have never dealt with Arabic in my time as a web developer. What font choices do I have that should be available on the vast majority of Arabic speakers' computers?

Answer

Basil Bourque picture Basil Bourque · Aug 25, 2011

Font stack

Be sure to use a CSS 'font stack' to list many fonts by name in order of your preference. For example:

font-family: "Geeza Pro", "Nadeem", "Al Bayan", "DecoType Naskh", "DejaVu Serif", "STFangsong", "STHeiti", "STKaiti", "STSong", "AB AlBayan", "AB Geeza", "AB Kufi", "DecoType Naskh", "Aldhabi", "Andalus", "Sakkal Majalla", "Simplified Arabic", "Traditional Arabic", "Arabic Typesetting", "Urdu Typesetting", "Droid Naskh", "Droid Kufi", "Roboto", "Tahoma", "Times New Roman", "Arial", serif;

CAVEAT The fonts above were arbitrarily chosen as possibly having Arabic glyphs. That list is not my recommendation; I have not seen any of those fonts as I neither read nor speak Arabic. You are responsible for making your own choice of fonts.

Alan Wood's Unicode Resources provides lists of Arabic fonts for:

Those lists are somewhat outdated. You may find that Apple, Microsoft, and the Linux makers have been adding more and better fonts to better support non-European scripts in recent years.

Alan Wood also provides this Arabic test page.

DejaVu Font

Example text in all three families of Deja Vu font: Sans, Serif, and Mono

DejaVu is an actively developed, open-source, free license, and free of cost font. Has wide support for various scripts including Arabic. Installed by default on many Linux distros. Has serif, sans serif, and monospace families. See PDF samples.

Most glyphs are well designed. If you find any to be lacking, you are welcome to design and contribute improvements.

BEWARE DejaVu is released in different packages. The LGC downloads (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic) omit Arabic and similar character sets due to technical issues. Pay close attention when choosing from their download page.

Google for "font survey" to find percentage of computers that have been found to have various fonts installed.

Fonts supplied with:

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