Arabic and Latin typefaces

rosea14

Hi there, does anyone know of any typefaces that are primarily Arabic, and the Latin counterpart is much more of an afterthought and perhaps not well executed? Any help would be greatly appreciated

Paul Hanslow

Rosea, there are some Arabic typefaces which seem to feature poorly designed Latin glyph-sets, but this may possibly due to legacy reasons. For example, some non-Latin fonts contain a limited Latin glyph-set which is often appears to be from a different typeface, making it look poorly designed. I'm not the best person to explain why this is the case and my explanation will lack the detail which other, well informed, TypeDrawers users could explain.

Upon reading your question Titus Nemeth's Aisha typeface came to mind as, and I quote, "The Latin version of Aisha is one of the designs where the style of the Arabic version shaped the direction for the Roman letters, rather than the other way around." (source). 

Simon Cozens

Oh well, if you’re talking about Arabic fonts with well designed Latins, the obvious one is Borna Izadpanah’s Gulzar with a matching Latin designed by Alice Savoie. (Disclaimer: I was involved in that project.)

But I think the question was about Arabic fonts with badly designed Latins?

John Hudson

A lot of Arabic fonts from the larger, older foundries such as Linotype and Monotype have Latin subsets that are derived from other typefaces in their libraries. We worked on mastering the Linotype Arabic OpenType conversion, and part of that process was to identify Latin companion typefaces from the Linotype library and integrate them into the Arabic sources. We tried to select Latin types that were stylistically appropriate to the Arabic, and scaled them to coordinate reasonably well with the vertical proportions of the Arabic—typically by aligning the Latin ascender height to the Arabic alif height—, but the relative weights were often not what we would ideally want them to be, or what they would be if we were able to tailor the Latin more precisely. [By contrast, when we made Adobe Arabic we had access to multiple master sources for Minion, so could adjust the weight for better balance with the Arabic.]

Then there is the peculiar case of Microsoft’s Arabic Typesetting naskh font. The original brief was to design a Latin to harmonise in weight and proportion with Paul Nelson’s original Arabic design, which is what I did. Then Paul asked Mamoun Sakkal to review the Arabic, and Microsoft ended up commissioning Mamoun to improve the Arabic, which ended up being complete redrawn. My own feeling is that the Latin I designed to harmonise with the earlier Arabic design no longer fits quite as well with the final Arabic as I would have liked, but I never had the opportunity to revise it.

AzizMostafa AzizAli

For unique and dynamic Arabic and Arabic-based typefaces (attached pdf), I never care including Latin. Why should I?

All the Best for All with Flowers https://T.me/FonJawi

Khaled Hosny

Qahiri is an Arabic fobt with purposefully badly designed Latin.