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Any studies on the best Arabic font and size to use in your website ? Has anyone done some testing to see which were the most efficient ? |
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The field of arabic fonts has yet to be developed and studied. So far no studies have been done, and very few arabic fonts (all of which not designed for web) are actually "web-safe".
The way you view your arabic fonts on websites depends on which arabic fonts you have installed in your system. For example on Mac OS X, the very few Arabic System fonts - that are designed for print - and as all arabic fonts, are by design 4pts smaller than latin ones (creating this conflict you speak about when mixed with English). Here is a sample Arabic system font for Mac (geeza pro) and it does not look good: http://mayazankoul.com/images/Picture-6.png As for Windows, the latest versions of Microsoft’s core fonts that include Arabic characters are Arial, Courier New and Times New Roman, all of which are not - again - designed for web and pixels, and where the curves resulting from the calligraphic nature of arabic, make them look bad on screen.
1) Design arabic system fonts specifically for web: The next step would be from Arabic type designers to start creating fonts designed specifically for the screen (some initiatives have already started, however, the fonts are not yet available as system fonts). 2) Plugins that allow to preview fonts even if you dont have them installed: I recently came across this WordPress plugin that allows you to preview fonts online even if you don't have the font in your system. This could be a solution to the Arabic web font problem. More about the plugin: http://blogsessive.com/blogging-tools/anyfont-wordpress-plugin/
Prominent Arabic type designers who are needed to the rescue: Pascal Zoghbi, Nadine Chahine, Yara Khoury Nammour, Krystian Sarkis, Wael Morcos...
This is a website that uses an interesting array of Arabic fonts: http://www.exahost.com.sa/ As you see, the interesting parts are placed as images... So the solution for arabic online for now is to use as many images as possible, and only keep the text for large paragraphs. |
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This is one of my the main items on my never ending to-Do list. I did some basic reading - but still more to investigate. Here are the current finds, if anyone can help me fill the gaps, it would be great : Webdesigners always have to make sure that they use a common font for their website, otherwise it'll display incorrect on browser that don't have the font installed. This can be really annoying if you want to use a nice custom font. You could load the font in Photoshop and save it as an image,but this isn't dynamic and is not SEO. ** Solutions on how to make dynamic custom fonts : ** 1- PHP Image Replacement** ( putting graphic designers and php in the same sentence is not gonna end well :P ) 2 - sIFR 3 - ??? 4 - ??? The PHP Image Replacement works fine and is easy to install, but if you want more options (Selecting & copying the text, linking the replacement with an URL), you should take a look at sIFR. This works with Flash and doesn't need a PHP server. here are some interesting link : http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/sifr http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr/ I was checking on wordpress, there are many plugins that support the idea of custom fonts http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=any+font&sort= Using any custom font, specially arabic ones , can help solve the reading issues but i am sure it has performance hits on page loading speeds specially for journals and such Maybe the best option, is to lobby, get nice fonts from typographist, sign a big petition and submit it to apple/microsoft. For linux/ubuntu, it should be easier to do this Sorry for the long reply.. if anyone has done further reading on the topic, plz share |
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You want to choose Arabic font type for your website that:
And Support Arabic So there is three type pf Fonts: Arial, Courier New and Times New Roman, But Tahoma also works fine for a lot of website So we will need a votesee this page http://erpegypt.com/test/font.htm Every One (i mean every read this Answer) had to choose the best as he saw then please send me Mahmoud.rizk@gmail.com the Name of the Fonts You like in Head or Body
This answer is marked "community wiki".
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I was recently part of a group that was actually putting together a project for developing new arabic fonts. We decided that we may use of the open source Cufon library to embed fonts in non @font-face supportive browsers. Cufon supports using Javascript and Canvas tag / SVG - all open standards. Cufon is a pretty new open source project but it is already considered the best option out there (other options include Sifr - using Flash & Facelift). I haven't used this combination, so there may be something better that others are using. Takar Content Solutions Manager |
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All the Arabic fonts in the award winning Linotype and Monotype libraries are available as web fonts. Some are even available for the free sign-up option from fonts.com: http://webfonts.fonts.com/en-US Examples include: Neue Helvetica Arabic, Frutiger Arabic, Univers Next Arabic, Neo Sans Arabic, Palatino Sans Arabic, Janna, Koufiya, Tanseek, Mitra, Nazanin, Yakout, Lotus etc... The fonts include support for Latin and so can be used at the same point size for both Latin and Arabic texts. Browser support is now available for Arabic with the exception of Opera on the Mac. All else is looking good so I hope to see great looking Arabic websites soon! This one looks nice: http://www.ikbis.com and is using Neo Sans Arabic by my friend and colleague Patrick Giasson. cheers, Nadine
This answer is marked "community wiki".
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