McEs, A Hacker Life: The Most Beautiful Persian OpenType Font

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

The Most Beautiful Persian OpenType Font

Glad I asked for it last month!

Apparently the Supreme Council of ICT of Iran has released the first ever OpenType Persian Nastaliq font. This is of great importance because previously all Persian Nastaliq solutions were Windows-only systems requiring custom rendering engine installed and only worked with select applications. Not anymore!

Anyway, very nice outcome of a governmental-funded project in Iran. I quite appreciate that. The font can be downloaded here.

Now to the interesting part. Again, Pango 1.18.3 and gedit:

The font itself is far from perfect in its OpenType tables, but it's a great start. I've been wanting that for so long... The only issue is that the font doesn't hold a clear license. Got to sort that out and voila! I know, I'm clearly excited. Very excited.

Labels: gedit, gnome, harfbuzz, IranNastaliq, Nastaliq, pango, Persian

¶ 5:27 PM

Comments:

Licence looks clearly non-free, it would be awesome if it were to become free.

# posted by

Anonymous : November 28, 2007 6:56 PM

I think the owners simply didn't put any thought on the license, because, well, in Iran you are free to copy what you can download... It's more negligence IMO. Will contact them.

# posted by

behdad : November 28, 2007 11:20 PM

Also as a government organization I don't see any other option for them than releasing this as public-domain.

# posted by

pooya : November 29, 2007 12:33 AM

I'm so glad to read positive things happening in your country (even if they are little things). I'm sick of what is said in the others medias about Iran.

Openness is what we need.

An european.

# posted by

Anonymous : November 29, 2007 6:19 AM

I was testing this font with pango 1.18.3 but there was a little problem:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=500460

# posted by

Anonymous : November 29, 2007 12:51 PM

I tried this on a few sentences; it renders some words beautifully, others not at all. Saalikaan (travelers) ends up looking very strange, and the alef in Chinaanchih is disconnected. But it's great to see this kind of beauty in an OpenType font!

# posted by

Anonymous : November 29, 2007 1:10 PM

All works for me great here. Please file bugs at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ with images if it doesn't work with Pango 1.18.3. Thanks.

# posted by

behdad : November 29, 2007 9:12 PM

Yay! An alternative to Microsoft Farsi or Naskh.

Thanks for pointing this out.

# posted by

Anonymous : December 01, 2007 3:42 AM

I'm not sure what it's called in Farsi, so forgive me, but I just now realized that the taTawiil (lengthening character) seems to be missing. Not that it matters a whole lot, it just looks ugly if you try to put one in.

# posted by

Anonymous : December 01, 2007 3:54 AM

Right, no tatweel yet.

# posted by

behdad : December 01, 2007 4:12 AM

That is really one of the most beautiful fonts I've seen, ever. However, I found that many glyphs were corrupted, fortunately I found another (I think an older) version of the font on the web and I replaced the corrupted glyphs from it. Also, there were some problems with pango which magically disappeared after processing the font with fontforge. Now I want to release this, but the license is unclear and I don't read Persian to understand any thing from their web site, any ideas?

Sorry for posting this here.
BTW, tatweel works with some combinations but sometimes not.

# posted by

Anonymous : April 10, 2008 9:46 AM

Khaled, please contact me using my email address.

# posted by

behdad : April 15, 2008 3:17 PM

hi, can any1 tell me how to install pango for windows thanks.

# posted by

Anonymous : April 18, 2009 8:43 PM

Can I use the font in MS Word? Anyone knows a download link?

# posted by

Anonymous : July 14, 2013 3:43 PM

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