Noqte

A fun, minimalistic Persian pixel font.

Introduction

I made this font in a week from scratch in order to use it in my game. The em-height is 1024 points. Each glyph is made of 100x100 points squares. There are some exceptions, sadly, mainly for designing diacritics. Those might be removed in a final version, however. For those at moment another square size is used which is 75% of the base square, i.e. 75x75 points.

I have made a few design choices and tried to remain consistent as much as possible:

• There is no left bearing anywhere
• All initial glyphs have one block right bearing (100 points empty space to the right)
• Important: medial forms have no bearing to the right. I assumed that other initial or medial glyph should consider this and add blocks to the left if necessary
• The bottom left block on each initial glyph is empty (exceptions FEH & QAF)
• The bottom left block on each medial glyph is full

There might be some minor divergences, which is either a bug and should be fixed or is due to diacritics.

Features

The font covers main charachters for Persian from the following Unicode blocks:

• Arabic (0600–06FF)
• Arabic Presentation Forms-A (FB50–FDFF)
• Arabic Presentation Forms-B (FE70–FEFF)
• Basic Latin (ASCII)
• Latin-1 Supplement (partial)

Moreover, Basic Latin i.e. ASCII and some suplementary letters and signs are included. I included as much as necessary to make the font usable for German and Spanish.

Glyphs

Here is a subset of glyphs.

Building

Install FontForge then build either using FontForge or the Makefile:

$ make

A font file should be generated in the same folder called noqte.ttf.

Bugs

Please report them on the repository or email me. The following problems are known to me:

• There is no kerning
• There are no anchors: top and bottom anchors added back in January 2024
• Diacritics are not well-positioned: positioning improved using the aforementioned anchors
• Lookup tables still incomplete

Test

There is a development script and an SDL test file included. To watch the changes and rebuild do:

$ make watch

or directly

$ make ttftest

and then run ttftest executable. SDL and HarfBuzz should be available on your system.

Aknowledgement

Credit when credit is due. I benefited from the work of others mentioned below.

• Typography by Farshid Mesghali (تایپوگرافی اثر فرشید مثقالی): on Persian typography
• FontForge: I designed everything in it
• Design with FontForge: the FontForge book
• pixeldroid Console: learned from their design choices
• شروع با FontForge: helped me to get started with FontForge
• How To Make a Snap-to Grid In FontForge: helped me to make a grid of my own

License

Copyright 2022 Mehdi Sadeghi

Licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1, with Reserved Font Name Noqte.