An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

The history deserves recording because most people outside the small world of Arabic font engineering don't know it, and it is wonderful. Classical Arabic typography, by which I mean the manuscript tradition that the early printers of Istanbul and Bulaq spent their careers chasing, justifies a line of text without stretching the spaces between words at all. Stretched spaces are the Latin convention, and in Arabic they produce an effect the scribes would have found simply ugly. Instead the scribe extends the letterforms themselves along the baseline, using what is called taṭwīl or, in the modern technical vocabulary, kashida: the connecting strokes between certain pairs of letters can be lengthened, sometimes lavishly, to carry a line out to the margin. A well-set page of Naskh from the seventeenth century has every line flush at both margins, and the result is the dense, regular weave that anyone who has spent time with a good manuscript Qurʾān will recognise on sight.

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The one great exception is Amiri, the Naskh face that Khaled Hosny, an Egyptian doctor by training who taught himself OpenType tooling over the course of about a decade, built and released under the SIL Open Font License in 2011 and has polished continuously since. The name is the lineage: Amiri revives the typeface of al-Maṭbaʿa al-Amīriyya, the Bulaq Press face that set the 1924 Cairo Qurʾān, which means the best free Arabic font of the digital era is a one-man reconstruction of the best government-funded font of the metal era, and I never get tired of saying that sentence. And it is engineered, not merely drawn. The required ligatures are done with care; the 1.0 rewrite, in 2022, reimplemented the allāh ligature to be more cautious about when it fires. The mark stacking holds up under fully vowelled text. And since that rewrite the font carries a curvilinear kashida: feed it elongations and it substitutes graded, swelling curved strokes, in four sizes, the way the pen would. Scroll back to the mockup card at the top of the page; those curves are Amiri's own work, performed live in your browser. If you are reading an Arabic text rendered well on the open web in 2026, there is a respectable chance you are reading Amiri. The rest of the ecosystem (Scheherazade New from SIL International, Reem Kufi also by Hosny, the various Noto Arabic faces Google commissioned) fills in around it.