Which Arabic font do you use for Microsoft Word or Photoshop?

LAST UPDATED: 1 month ago

Writing in Arabic on a mobile phone works like a charm. But writing texts on Microsoft Word or LibreOffice is still quite challenging. It basically starts with choosing a good font.

Both – Times New Roman and Arial – offer Arabic support. They are not bad at all, but sometimes they may look weird and become hard to read – especially if you use diacritical marks (Tashkeel/تَشْكِيل) and mix them with other fonts.

What options for Arabic fonts do you have?

There are Arabic fonts which are beautifully crafted. However, they are pretty expensive. I will offer you here two options which usually work and get the job done.

• Option 1 – a conservative font that is perfect for beginners and has great support of diacritical marks: Deja Vu Sans.
• Option 2 – Noto Sans: A free font with great Arabic support
• Option 2 – Google Fonts which offers more sophisticated fonts that look great, but may also be a bit fussy.

Option 1: Deja Vu

I like to use Deja Vu Sans in documents. It is a very clear font that clearly marks all diacritical marks at their appropriate position.

The DejaVu fonts are a font family based on the Vera Fonts. Its purpose is to provide a wider range of characters. The best thing – they are under a free license. In other words, you can download them and use them in your documents without worrying about copyright issues.

You can download it here: https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/

Unless you are using Linux, I would recommend downloading the ZIP-file. You will find the fonts in the TTF (TrueType)-format. If you don't know how to install such files, I will give some hints later in this blog post.

Option 2: Noto Sans

Google offers a great font with Arabic support for free. The font family is called Noto Sans and displays all diacritical signs very nicely.

Where can you get it? Just follow this link:

Option 3: Google Fonts

There is a great option which is called GOOGLE FONTS: fonts.google.com

Google offers professional fonts for free. You don't need to buy them. Many people forget that you can't just download a font and use it. You need to obtain a license. If you use Google fonts, you are fine.

Buy Arabic fonts

Many websites offer professional Arabic fonts made by designers. They do cost some money, however, if you are looking for a beautiful and remarkable font for Photoshop, you may check out such websites.

A nice example is a font called Felfel which you can buy for $20 here.

How do you download Arabic fonts?

Choose the language: Arabic

On the right part of your screen, you will see the option “Languages”. Choose Arabic.

Choose a font

You will now see all fonts that offer full Arabic support.

Download the font

Click on the “plus”-symbol to mark the fonts you want to download. After that you will see a new window at the bottom. Enlarge it.

In order to download it, click on the symbol on the right.

Unzip the file

You will end up with a zip-file called “fonts.zip”.

Unzip it.

Install the fonts

You will see some TrueType-files now with the extension .TTF.  Usually, it works if you simply open them with a double-click. If your operating system doesn't know what to do, try to press the right mouse button and see if you could open or install the file with a font manager.

If all this doesn't work out, go to google and search for: “install ttf files”.

How do you write the “Basmallah” or Allah (the “Grand Word”) in a nice way?

For example: In the name of God/Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful: بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ – check out this blog post:

• Tools and Apps

How do you write Allah as a calligraphy?

The word Allah is often written like a calligraphy – with the dagger Aleph. There are several ways to achieve that in Microsoft Word or Libre Office.

REMARK: Twitter-User Zübeyt Nalçakan (@ZubeytNalcakan) suggested the following website: http://arbfonts.com

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