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 avialable under the terms of Open Font License, see the included license file for more details.
Latest version of the Amiri font can be optained 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, gpp and FontTools:
$ sudo apt-get install python-fontforge gpp
$ python -m venv amiri --system-site-packages
$ . amiri/bin/activate
$ pip install fonttools brotli
To build the font files run:
$ make ttf