Mirza Arabic Font Project

Mirza is a body text typeface based on the Naskh script, with 4 different weights. The design aims to observe the rules of Arabic and Persian aesthetics with the help of ligatures. All Arabic and Persian readers are familiar with the shapes of Mirza's characters, and they are comfortable for reading long texts. Unlike many other Arabic fonts, Mirza includes a Latin typeface designed for harmony with the Arabic to make it useful for multilingual texts.

Preview

Homepage

At the Live Testing Page you can test the fonts in the browser.

If you like the live testing page see Online Font Project.

There are some PDF Testing documents.

Building

Dependencies

To build the font files:

fontTools: https://github.com/behdad/fonttools
AFDKO (makeotf): http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko.html
python-fontforge (>>> import fontforge): http://fontforge.github.io
defcon ufo3 branch: https://github.com/typesupply/defcon/tree/ufo3
unicodedata2: https://github.com/mikekap/unicodedata2

To build the pdf testing documents:

latexmk: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/latexmk/
texlive (xetex): https://www.tug.org/texlive/ (http://xetex.sourceforge.net/)

Build the fonts:

.Path/to/Mirza$ make

or run the build script directly

.Path/to/Mirza$ ./Tools/build.sh

This will create all files in the Fonts directory

Testing documents

You should have created/updated the fonts in Fonts. See above.

.Path/to/Mirza$ make preparedoc
.Path/to/Mirza$ make doc

This will generate pdf files in Generated/Documents

Workflow

Mirza was designed using Glyphs.

The source files are in the Sources directory. Mirza 2 Masters.glyphs and Mirza-LATIN-SOURCE.glyphs

We use *.ttf, *.otf and *.ufo (for kerning) files generated by Glyphs (with production names) in the build process. The files are located in the Sources/Build/Arabic and Sources/Build/Latin directories.

The build process merges the Arabic and Latin sources and generates OT-features for them.

GSUB features are defined in the *.fea files in Sources.

GPOS features are generated on the fly from the files in Sources/Build directories. mark and mkmk are taken from the *.otf files, kern is created from the *.ufos.

Credits and License

Arabic font design: Kourosh Beigpour
Latin font design: Eduardo Tunni
font engineering: Lasse Fister

License: SIL OPEN FONT LICENSE

Tarobish / Mirza

readme