Arabic Font for Books: Text Faces for Long Reading in Print

What a book face must do

• Stay comfortable for hours: a text face is judged on full pages, not on a headline. Look at the even gray of a paragraph.
• Cover every role: chapter titles, body, quotations, footnotes and running heads. Count the weights you need before you choose.
• Handle vowel marks: poetry, classical texts and textbooks are often partly or fully voweled.
• Save space without crowding: page count drives printing cost, but tall ascenders and marks need their line height.
• Stay stable across the team: author, editor and printer should use the same font version, or line breaks will shift between proofs.

Which text face for your book

Amiri, a revival of the Cairo press type of the early 20th century, gives literature, history and religious texts a classical voice. It has two weights, Regular and Bold, so plan footnotes and headings with size rather than weight.

Scheherazade New offers Regular, Medium, SemiBold and Bold. Choose it for textbooks and academic publishing that need a restrained hierarchy, and record the installed version (4.500 here) in the production specification.

Lateef has seven weights, from ExtraLight to ExtraBold, and a design background in South Asian Arabic-script languages. Choose it when a book needs many levels, and test it with those readers if they are your audience.

Noto Naskh Arabic suits multilingual publishing: its single variable file runs from 400 to 700, and it covers Persian and Urdu as well as Arabic. Do not assume it shares line breaks with other Noto families.

Gulzar is an Urdu Nastaliq designed for reading in print and on screen. Choose it for Urdu books. It is a different style from Naskh, not a substitute for it.

Production tips

• Lay out the book in an application with full Arabic support. In InDesign, that means the World-Ready composer and a right-to-left paragraph direction.
• Set a sample spread with body text, a footnote, a quotation and a heading, then print it on the final paper before you fix the line height.
• Embed the fonts in the print PDF. The Open Font License allows embedding, and printers expect it.
• Archive the exact font files with the project, so a reprint years later matches the first edition.

The Naskh faces above are filed under the Naskh style; read how to choose an Arabic font to weigh text against display faces. For fully vocalized scripture, see Quran fonts; for manuscripts drafted in Word, see Arabic fonts for Microsoft Word.

Awami Nastaliq requires Graphite 1.3.4 or later. Check it in LibreOffice or Firefox with Graphite enabled; Chrome and Safari may show an incorrect preview.