What are my "web font" choices for Arabic?

Google provides free fonts

Getting Started Guide: https://developers.google.com/webfonts/docs/getting_started#Quick_Start


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:

  • Mac OS X
  • Mac OS 9
  • Windows

Those lists are somewhat outdated.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:

  • Mac OS X (Apple)
    • Across generations (click to sort on Target script)
  • iOS (Apple)
    • Across generations
  • Windows (Microsoft)
    • Across generations (click to sort on Target Script)
    • Windows 8
    • Windows 7
    • Windows Vista
    • Windows XP SP2
  • Google
    • Roboto font
    • Droid Arabic Kufi & Naskh for Google™ fonts

+1 with Tahoma and DejaVu ("DejaVu sans" for emphasis) were the way to go, but things are changing --thanks God-- with first Arabic Web Fonts coming out earlier this year.

  • Alefba has put some useful information and ressources on the subject, e.g. Arabic and Persian Webfonts with WordPress blogs
  • See also How to use custom arabic fonts in your web design projects recently published by Hussain from Bahrain Web Design

Hope this will be of any help for you or any other Arabic website designer.

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