خالد حسني أَنَا الّذِي نَظَرَ الأَعْمَى إِلَى أَدَبِي وَأَسْمَعَتْ كَلِمَاتِي مَنْ بِهِ صَمَمُ

Update: I rewrote this port and changed its title from Pango vs. FriBiDi, as people misunderstood my point.

We have at least two free software libraries that are capable of doing Arabic shaping, Pango and the FriBiDi (fribidi-0.19 only).

Smart fonts are fonts that is accompanied by instructions that define how glyphs are selected to be laid out, in contrast dumb fonts does not contain such instructions and the text is laid out by simple character to glyph mapping.

Nafees Nastaleeq font is a great Nasta`liq (AKA Farsi) style font that supports mainly Urdu but some Arabic characters still missing. The font is very carefully designed and looks almost like hand written calligraphy, I'm really impressed by the amount of effort spent to develop such font. What impresses me more is that the latest version was released under a free license.

How beautiful is that!