Amiri (typeface)


Amiri is a naskh-based typeface for Arabic script designed by Dr. Khaled Hosny. Beta released December 2011. As of October 22, 2019, it is hosted on 67,000 websites, and is served by the Google Fonts API approximately 74.8 million times per week.

Inspiration

The Amiri typeface draws inspiration from a naskh typeface pioneered by the Bulaq Press, also called al-Mataabi' al-Amiriya, in 1905.
On the 1905 typeface and of challenges of digitizing Arabic script, Dr. Hosny wrote: "One of the most novel features of the Bulaq typeface is maintaining the æsthetics of Naskh calligraphy while meeting the requirements of typesetting, a balance that is not easily achieved."
The Amiri project was supported by Google Web Fonts, TeX Users Group, and donations from users.

Features

Amiri was released under the SIL Open Font License.
The typeface itself has four styles: regular, bold, slanted, bold slanted, and two companions for Koranic typesetting: Amiri Quran and Amiri Quran Colored. All of which are available in TrueType outlines and OpenType format.
The Amiri font makes extensive use of OpenType features to produce automatic positionings and substitutions, including wide varieties of contextual forms, ligatures and kerning to the Arabic letters and the verse number of āyah, and offers several optional features including character variants for specific letters and text figures for Arabic digits.
The Amiri font itself was published and developed exclusively with free software, including FontForge, Inkscape, Python and VIM.