12 TUGboat, Volume 33 (2012), No. 1

The Amiri typeface

Khaled Hosny

In 1905, the famous Bulaq printing press in Cairo(also known as al-Amiriya, the royal press) issueda new Arabic typeface as part of reviving the thenmoribund printing press. This typeface later came tobe one of the most widely used and highly regardedArabic typefaces, even in the digital era.

Arabic has strong calligraphic traditions withmany styles, and Naskh (“to copy”) is the mostcommonly used style in typesetting. One of the mostnovel features of the Bulaq typeface is maintainingthe æsthetics of Naskh calligraphy while meetingthe requirements (and limitations) of typesetting, abalance that is not easily achieved.

Amiri is a revival of that typeface, and though itis not the first one, I believe it is the most elaborateand most complete, as all other revivals omit manyof the letter forms in the metal type either for sim-plicity or limitations of early digital systems. On theother hand, features that are merely a result of thelimitations of metal typesetting are not reproducedin Amiri, when appropriate.

Work on the Amiri typeface started slowly inlate 2008, with the first alpha release in November2010 and the first beta in December 2011. Thoughformally still in beta stage, it is now considered tobe mature enough for general use. It will not bemarked stable until there are no metric-incompatiblechanges planned.

The Amiri family includes regular, bold, slantedand bold slanted fonts. Though slanted type is nota particularly Arabic concept, it is provided becauseof widespread use in contemporary typesetting, es-pecially on the web, and right-leaning fake-slantedArabic is very unnatural. The bold font is not as pol-ished as the regular one, and still needs more work.

Amiri fully covers the “Arabic” and “ArabicSupplement” blocks in version 6.0 of Unicode, andthus it supports any language written in Arabic thatis supported by Unicode. This includes, for exam-ple, Arabic, Fula, Hausa, Jawi, Kashmiri, Kurdish,Ottoman Turkish, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Sindhi,Swahili, Urdu, Uyghur and Wolof. Work on new Ara-bic additions to version 6.1 of the standard is underway. “Arabic Presentation Forms–A” and “ArabicPresentation Forms–B” blocks are also covered forthe sake of completeness, though they are composedmostly of compatibility characters.

Great care has been taken to make sure Amirican be used to typeset the Qur’an (the book of Islam)

Sample from Kalilah wa Dimnah, Bulaq, 1938.

٪٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩غظضذخثتشرقصفعسنملكيطحزوهدجبأ

٪٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩غظضذخثتشرقصفعسنملكيطحزوهدجبأ

٪٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩غظضذخثتشرقصفعسنملكيطحزوهدجبأ

٪٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩غظضذخثتشرقصفعسنملكيطحزوهدجبأ

The four styles in the Amiri family.

كدوخقلخفص

لثم

شلٱ

سم

إ

تغزبذ

ىظحي

ضلٱ

ءالجناهبعيج

راطعم

Arabic pangram set in Amiri.

by providing the needed glyphs and shaping rules,sometimes working around the shortcomings of Uni-code.

Amiri is free software, available under the termsof the SIL Open Font License (OFL) v1.1. Additionalfree licenses will be considered if the need arises (e.g.,to remix it with another free typeface).

The development of the Amiri typeface has beensupported by the TUG development fund and GoogleWeb Fonts, as well as generous donations from enthu-siastic users. Amiri also owes much of its existenceto the great help offered by its users reporting bugs,testing on platforms and configurations to which I donot have access, and offering great insight on variousaspects of typesetting and language support.

Short to medium-term plans for Amiri includecoverage of recently added Arabic characters to Uni-code, polishing the bold font, and spinning off spe-cialized fonts, e.g., a font for Qur’an typesetting withdefaults that are more suitable for Qur’an than regu-lar text. Longer-term plans include math and displaycompanions.

Amiri has been developed exclusively using freesoftware, mainly FontForge, Inkscape, Python andVIM.

� Khaled Hosnyhttp://amirifont.org

Khaled Hosny