A guide to Arabic typography for designers

For designers trained on Latin: how Arabic typesetting differs, and the mistakes that recur in first projects.

Setting Arabic is not the same problem as setting Latin. The differences are not cosmetic — they reach into how the text engine has to behave, what fonts must support, and how a layout has to be planned. A designer who applies Latin habits to Arabic without adjustment will produce work that, even when not technically broken, will read as wrong to anyone Arabic-literate. This page is the short version of what is different and where the recurring mistakes are.

Five fundamental differences

Arabic is cursive. Letters connect along the baseline, and almost every letter changes shape depending on its position in a word. There are no separate uppercase and lowercase forms — Arabic has no case distinction at all — so headings, body, and proper nouns all use the same letterforms. Vertical position matters: letters carry dots above and below, and diacritics, when used, sit in carefully calibrated positions that depend on the letter beneath. Some letter combinations require mandatory ligatures, the laam-alif (لا) being the universal example. And the line runs right to left.

Most of the typographic implications of these differences fall on the font and the layout engine, not the designer. But several decisions remain the designer's: which font, how to handle mixed scripts, what to do about diacritics, and what proportions to set the page at.

Type categories

Arabic typefaces fall into a few broad families. Knowing which one you have chosen, and whether it suits your purpose, is the first piece of competence.

Traditional Naskh. The body-text workhorses, modelled on the Naskh calligraphic hand. They keep the canonical letter shapes, support full vocalisation cleanly, and read well at small sizes. Most printed Arabic books use a face from this category — Amiri, Adobe Arabic, the various Naskh families bundled with operating systems. If you are setting a long passage of body text and you do not have a strong reason to choose otherwise, the right answer is a Naskh face.

Display and calligraphic. Faces drawn in the spirit of Thuluth, Diwani, Kufic, or Ruq'ah, intended for display use. They look beautiful at large size and are usually a poor choice at small size. Most "fancy Arabic" fonts you encounter online are display faces; treating them as if they were body fonts is one of the most common amateur mistakes.

Geometric and sans-serif. A relatively recent development, dating largely to the second half of the twentieth century, paralleling the rise of geometric Latin sans-serif. Faces in this category strip away the calligraphic contrast and let the letters be drawn from constructed geometry. Some are excellent — they offer Arabic typography a register of cool modernism that the calligraphic tradition does not provide — and some are terrible, ignoring rules of letter proportion that calligraphic literacy would have caught. The difference between a good and a bad geometric Arabic font is large; consult a native designer if you are choosing one for a long-term identity.

Simplified Arabic. A category of typefaces, the most famous being the Linotype-era "Simplified Arabic" family, that reduce the number of contextual forms a letter can take in order to fit early phototypesetting and digital systems. They were a technical compromise. They look stiff and dated to a contemporary Arab eye, much as a 1980s computer font looks dated to an English-speaking one. They remain in use in some institutional contexts but should not be a default choice for new design work.

Font selection: what to check

The most consequential thing about an Arabic font is whether it is actually competent. Several specific failures recur.

Missing or broken ligatures. The laam-alif must be a single fused glyph; if your font renders it as a separate laam followed by a separate alif, the font is not properly Arabic and you should reject it on sight. Other contextual ligatures should also work — laam-meem, kaaf-alif, and so on, depending on the font's level of refinement. Set the word لا in any candidate font as a quick test.

Diacritic positioning. If your text uses vocalisation, the marks must sit cleanly above and below their letters without colliding with surrounding strokes. A surprising number of fonts handle this badly. Set a fully vocalised word — بِسْمِ ٱللَّٰهِ is the canonical test — and check that every mark is in its proper place.

Persian or Urdu fonts mistaken for Arabic. Many "Arabic" fonts available freely online are actually Persian or Urdu fonts with Arabic letter coverage. They typically have Persian-style letter shapes (notably for ك kaaf and ي yaa, where Persian forms differ from Arabic) and may lack the full set of Arabic-specific glyphs and ligatures. Setting the word يكي ("one" in Persian) versus an Arabic equivalent reveals these differences. If your design is for an Arab audience, use an Arabic font.

No support for uncommon Arabic characters. Many fonts skimp on the long alif (ٱ), the alif maqsura (ى), the various hamza forms (ء أ إ ؤ ئ), or the punctuation marks (،, ؛, ؟). Verify these are present and well-drawn before you commit.

Mixing Arabic and Latin

Bilingual layouts — Arabic alongside English, French, or another Latin-script language — are common, and getting them right takes care.

The first issue is bidirectional handling. Modern browsers and layout tools handle bidi correctly when the text is properly tagged (dir="rtl" on Arabic elements, lang="ar" for shaping). When tags are missing, mixed text reflows wrongly: numbers, embedded English words, and punctuation can end up in the wrong order. The fix is at the markup level, not at the design level. If your tool does not let you set per-element direction, your tool is the problem.

The second issue is type pairing. An Arabic and a Latin face used together should feel like siblings in weight, x-height-equivalent, and overall colour on the page. Many Arabic fonts now ship with a paired Latin face designed by the same designer; using these pairs is much safer than mixing arbitrarily. If you do mix, consider that the visual size of the Arabic face will usually need to be set a few points larger than the Latin to feel comparable, because Arabic counts the height of the body of the letters from the baseline upward and downward, where Latin counts from the baseline upward to the cap height. Equal nominal point sizes look unequal optically.

The third issue is alignment. In a bilingual layout, the Arabic block aligns right-to-left and the Latin block aligns left-to-right; mirror layout for the Arabic version of a piece, do not just flip text inside a Latin layout. Page numbers, navigation, image captions, all flow the other way.

Line height, weight, and contrast

Arabic typically wants more line-height than Latin at the same nominal size. The dots above and below the letters, the diacritics if used, and the descending tails all consume vertical space. A Latin block at 1.4 line-height will, when set in Arabic at the same point size and line-height, look cramped. 1.6 or 1.8 is often a better starting point for body Arabic. Check by eye against an Arabic native designer's eye, not just by your trained Latin sense.

Weight is its own subject. Arabic letterforms have heavy bowls and thin connecting strokes, and the relationship between the two is partly a feature of the calligraphic tradition the font draws on. Bold Arabic, in many fonts, increases stroke weight uniformly and ends up too dark; a well-designed family will adjust contrast and proportion separately for its bolder weights.

RTL layout: what changes

Beyond the text itself, an RTL layout mirrors the page. The "primary" margin is on the right; the secondary, on the left. Reading flow is right-to-left and top-to-bottom — a magazine spread reads from the right page first, then the left. Hierarchy markers (bullet points, indents, hanging quotes) sit on the right rather than the left of their text. Forms, tables, and grids mirror: the first column is on the right, the last on the left. A Latin layout adapted to Arabic by simply flipping all text RTL while keeping the visual structure left-anchored will feel uncomfortably backward to an Arab reader.

Numbers, however, do not mirror. A phone number, a price, a date — written in either Eastern or Western numerals — runs left-to-right within the right-to-left text. Modern layout tools handle this automatically; it is worth checking that yours does. (See numerals.)

The minimum competent Arabic layout, then, is: properly tagged Arabic text with dir="rtl"; a font that supports the necessary ligatures, diacritics, and characters; line-height set generously; the page mirrored as a whole rather than just text-aligned right; and, if Latin is mixed in, a paired or carefully chosen Latin face. Get those in place and you will avoid most of the failure modes that mark amateur Arabic typography.