Layla Thuluth for an expressive Arabic title

Layla Thuluth is Mohammed Isam’s free Arabic title font, offered as a single Regular file. It gives you a concrete digital design to try for a cover or ceremonial heading, while leaving custom stacked Thuluth compositions to a calligrapher.

A title face is not a composition engine

Traditional Thuluth can arrange words in several levels, with carefully balanced vertical strokes and curves. This font provides reusable letterforms on a text line. Its name does not guarantee that an arbitrary phrase will become the same composition a calligrapher would draw.

Set a real short title above a separate text block. Inspect the tallest letters, the spaces between words and any marks close to the line above. Compare Katibeh for a different display interpretation, and Qahiri for an ornamental Kufi direction. The fonts for calligraphic design collection offers further comparisons without treating these styles as synonyms.

Version 2.0 and a single weight

The download includes the original LaylaThuluth.ttf, version 2.0, with the complete license. The preview uses the complete font compressed as WOFF2, at weight 400. There is no separate Bold file and no variable weight axis. Avoid using synthetic bold as a substitute for a deliberately designed second weight.

The supplied file covers Arabic, Persian and Latin. It encodes the common Arabic vowel marks and has a GSUB shaping table, but no GPOS table for advanced positioning. Check a vocalized title in the actual application and PDF export. Encoded marks alone do not establish suitability for a fully vocalized edition or Quranic typesetting.

Companion text and the license

Latin letters and numbers are credited to Basharat Ali’s Urdu Khush Khati. For a bilingual cover, judge the integrated Latin separately from the Arabic heading. A quiet Latin text face may be easier to balance for the subtitle; choose its size by appearance rather than forcing equal point sizes.

The author distributes this release under SIL Open Font License 1.1. Personal and commercial use, embedding and redistribution are permitted under its conditions. Keep the license, respect the reserved Layla names for distributed modifications, and do not sell the font by itself.

See the author’s Layla Thuluth publication and the Thuluth style page. Prepare your title with the Arabic keyboard; the Arabic font selection guide explains how to test it in the intended medium.

Compare Tholoth from the Arabeyes project for another title face with elongated strokes. Its historical file has a positioning table and a different license; proof the same marked phrase in both fonts before choosing.