Amiri — An Arabic text typeface
Amiri is a classical Arabic typeface in Naskh style for typesetting books and other running text.
Amiri is a revival of the beautiful typeface pioneered in early 20th century by Bulaq Press in Cairo, also known as Amiria Press, after which the font is named.
The uniqueness of this typeface comes from its superb balance between the beauty of Naskh calligraphy on one hand, the constraints and requirements of elegant typography on the other. Also, it is one of the few metal typefaces that were used in typesetting the Koran, making it a good source for a digital typeface to be used in typesetting Koranic verses.
Amiri project aims at the revival of the aesthetics and traditions of Arabic typesetting, and adapting it to the era of digital typesetting, in a publicly available form.
Amiri is a free, open source project that everyone is encouraged to use and modify. See the license for more details.
Font features
Amiri supports a large number of Arabic characters supported by Unicode, which includes support for Quranic notation as well as many languages that use the Arabic script. The font also provides a wide range of OpenType features. Please refer to the font documentation that describes many of these features.
Participation
All contributions are highly appreciated, you can help by:
Testing the font and reporting any issues or suggesting improvement, especially if you are a native speaker of any language using Arabic script other than Arabic language.
Improving glyph outlines and adding more variants, especially if you have experience with Arabic calligraphy.
Supporting the project. If you like the font and use it, I don’t mind receiving an email telling me so, and maybe some words of admiration :) You can also spread the word, the more people using it, the more the incentive to develop it more and more.
Reporting issues
We use a bug tracker where bugs reports and other suggestions should be sent.
Thanks
Thanks to every one who supported this project, especially:
- Abdarrahman Hosny, my younger brother, without his enormous help in drawing the glyph, this project would have stagnated for years.
- The TeX Users Group (TUG) for their generous fund.
- Fahd Al-Saidi and the people behind IT Wadi for their generous donation, that allowed me to devote more time to the project.
- Google for generous fund through Google Fonts.
License
Amiri font is distributed under Open Font License, which allows:
- The freedom to use the font in your book, your website or wherever you want.
- The freedom to modify the font to fit your needs, as long as the modified version is kept under this license.
- The freedom to distribute the font and any modified versions, even with products you sell, as long as you don’t sell the font on its own.
- Crediting the original authors of the font and not claiming it is yours.
See the link above for actual license text.