Version 0.007 - Arabic Support!


Plain Pixel now supports Arabic and other languages using Arabic script including Persian and Urdu. 

Arabic doesn't always lend itself well to monospace, but using Kawkab Mono as a guide, I think I was able to pull this off, matching the look and feel of the font as a whole while maintaining a style that I hope native speakers of these languages will appreciate.

The Unicode blocks Arabic, Arabic-Supplement, Arabic Extended-A&B, and Arabic Presentation Forms-B are fully represented. Arabic Presentation Forms-A contains a number of complex ligatures, with may contain up to 20 individual characters in one glyph. With an 11pt size pixel font this is impossible to do clearly in an 11x11 ish sized block. Previously, with 7x15, I just spelt the ligatures out in full size characters. If there is a demand for this I may do this again here. Unicode just released an updated version of Arabic Presentation Forms-A with a number of new complex ligatures. Unfortunately, the Unicode docs use an unfortunately stylized font in it's documentation that is not well readable. It'll take about 3-6 months for these changes to be reflected in other fonts around the Internet. When that happens, and I can read each of these ligatures clearly, I may revisit these characters and consider how to add them.

It's important to note that I'm not an Arabic speaker myself, nor am I a speaker of any language that uses the Arabic script. For that reason, I ask for anyone who uses this font to please let me know if you have any feedback. Feedback can include something not looking quite right, something not reading as a proper Arabic character, or even descriptions of outright mistakes. When reporting feedback, please try to make it actionable. Letting me know something is wrong is great, but letting me know why it's wrong and how you recommend I fix it would be really helpful!

Files

PlainPixel-Regular-V0_007.zip 310 kB
7 days ago

Get Plain Pixel - 11pt base multilingual font for pixel art.

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