Amiri is a classical Arabic typeface in Naskh style for typesetting books and other running text.
Amiri is a revival of the beautiful typeface pioneered in early 20th century by Bulaq Press in Cairo, also known as Amiria Press, after which the font is named.
The uniqueness of this typeface comes from its superb balance between the beauty of Naskh calligraphy on one hand, the constraints and requirements of elegant typography on the other. Also, it is one of the few metal typefaces that were used in typesetting the Koran, making it a good source for a digital typeface to be used in typesetting Koranic verses.
Amiri project aims at the revival of the aesthetics and traditions of Arabic typesetting, and adapting it to the era of digital typesetting, in a publicly available form.
Amiri is a free and open source project that everyone is encouraged to use and modify. Amiri is available under the terms of Open Font License, see the included license file for more details.
Latest version of the Amiri font can be obtained from its web site:
To edit the font sources, you will need FontForge, preferably the latest version. To install FontForge on Debian and Ubuntu:
$ sudo apt-get install fontforge
You can then open the source files in FontForge and start editing, either from GUI or from the command line:
$ fontforge sources/Amiri-Regular.sfdir
To build the fonts you need FontForge Python module, and a few other Python packages:
$ sudo apt-get install python-fontforge
$ python -m venv amiri --system-site-packages
$ . amiri/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
To build the font files run:
$ make ttf
To build the font files along with the web files; run:
$ make web
You might face an error with importing fontforge
File "tools/build.py", line 18, in <module>
import fontforge
ImportError: No module named fontforge
This is because FontForge does not work properly with Python 3 on Ubuntu 16.04. To build the fonts with Python version 2.7; install FontForge Python module by following the instructions from the official documentation. But make sure to enable python extension and scripting for Python 2.
After that, return back to the directory of the amiri repository and install the rest of dependencies and build the font as above.