Rana Kufi — A Fatimid Kufic typeface

Rana Kufi (كوفي رنا) is a Fatimid Kufic that follows the Fatimid Kufic rules and measurements pioneered by the late master of Arabic calligraphy Mohammad Abdul Qadir.

Rana Kufi is a free and open-source project, anyone is welcome to use and modify it under the terms of the version 3 of GNU Affero General Public License.

Rana Kufi can be seen as a tool to be used by calligraphers and designers to make Fatimid Kufic artwork and designs, so it tends to provide as much as possible glyph alternates to give its user enough freedom and flexibility to realize the desired design. This comes at the expense of increased complexity in using the font and requires its users to be aware of the rules and subtleties of Fatimid Kufic, so it’s advised to refer to the relevant resources on Fatimid Kufic, Mohammad Abdul Qadir’s book on Arabic calligraphy.

Rana Kufi is still under construction.

The app

The font provides many alternate shapes for many of its glyphs, which should be usable in any OpenType-savvy application. But since many apps have poor OpenType support, or bad UI, or don’t allow controlling features for a single glyphs, Rana Kufi comes with a web application that provides easy access to glyph alternates.