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

Since the first public announce of the XITS font, there have been 6 beta releases and I think the font is now more or less ready for more widespread use. The font is derived from STIX fonts and is thus under OFL, the development repository is hosted on githup. So all wonderful distribution packagers out there, please let me know if there is anything that needs to be done to facilitate packaging (anything but make files, patches are welcomed, though).

Thanks to the separation of dots and base glyphs approach, Amiri font can be easily extended to cover all additional characters required for other Arabic script using language. For example, here are all Arabic Wikipedia logos set in Amiri:

Getting out of my Amiri cave, just to tell you Amiri is there, it is real, it is no longer vapourware ;)

Well, the is actually the only readable phrase that can be written with the font right now, and no, there is no download link this time too :P

Last Friday, the long awaited (more than 10 years now?) STIX fonts were released. However, the release disappointed many people who want to typeset mathematics with STIX fonts, as they neither released LaTeX support files nor supplemented the fonts with the new OpenType MATH extension, ruling out any quality math typesetting engine.

Trying to make a joke of the continuous delay and missed milestones, I promised to provide an OpenType enriched version of the fonts within a week of its release, provided that I'm still alive and able to use computers, of course not believing they would ever release it. Now they proved me wrong and actually released the fonts, so I'm pleased to announce the first beta release of XITS font.

Arabic dots are diacritics and should be treated as diacritics, period.

Warning, a long and boring reading below.

I've been interested in the history of Bulaq Press in general, and the typefaces used there in particular, as I started working on my Bulaq revival font project.

I found two very valuable books about the subject; The History of Bulaq Press a master's thesis by Abu-Alfutuh Radwan, and Bulaq Press published by Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

I've been quiet about my traditional, naskh-like Arabic font project for a while, but it was slowly progressing.

First attempts of Arabic math typesetting. Using ConTeXt MkIV, LuaTeX and my experimental XITS Math font.

There are many legacy Arabic fonts floating on the web that can't be used in free operating systems, those fonts predate Unicode and OpenType and can only be used in MS Windows. There seem not exist any documentation of any kind regarding those fonts, and I had to guess how it is supposed to work. Out of boredom (and because someone asked me if there is a way to use those fonts in GNU/Linux), I wrote a Python script using FontForge's Python interface to convert them to Unicode with necessary OpenType layout to render them correctly.

I was trying to change the math font used in plain TeX (as opposed to LaTeX or ConTeXt), but I didn't seem to find it documented any where, apparently it is so obvious for TeXperts to be even documented. Anyway, I figured it out and I'm documenting it here so I don't have to search it again.

Set font families 0-3 to the new font, as follows:
0: math text ("sin", "cos", numbers, etc.)
1: math italic ("x", "y", "z", etc. don't have to be italic at all e.g. Euler)
2: math symbols
3: math extensions
\textfont: normal size font
\scriptfont: font for sub/super script