4. Fonts
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4. Fonts

Designing fonts is whole art on its own and requires a tremendous amount of patience and consistency. The first thing you need to have are font charts. Once you have the charts you will need the necessary tools to draw the fonts.

4.1. Unicode Charts

Here is a list of the Unicode charts that relate to Arabic:

Pay special attention to the following:

  • Punctuations: 060C, 061B, 061F, 0640, 064B, FD3E, FD3F

  • Harakat: 064B - 066D, 0670

  • Alef Wasla: FB50, FB51

  • Word Ligatures: FDF2

4.2. Font Tools

There are several free font editing/modifying/converting tools out there, in addition to commercial ones of course. For a quick discussion on font types, you might want to check the Font HOWTO. Most sepecifically, Section 2.1 titled "Types of Fonts".

Here is a list of some free font editors:

  • pfaedit - Postscript Font Editor (supports: postscript, TrueType, OpenType, cid-keyed and BDF).

  • xmbdfed - BDF font editor (supports: PK/GF, HBF, PSF, CP, FNT, vfont (Sun-console), Windows FON/FNT, TrueType, etc).

  • GFE - GNU's Font Editor (supports: BDF and PCF fonts).

It is not enough to be able to create fonts. You may also want to convert fonts from one format to another. Here are some useful converters:

  • ttf2bdf - A TTF to BDF font format converter.

  • ttf2pt1 - A TTF to Postscript (type-1) font format converter.

  • pcf2bdf - A PCF to BDF font format converter.

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