Back in 2007, a book Typographic matchmaking was published along with a CD with free beta versions of fonts produced for the projects. THe CD included early version of Fedra Arabic, however the fonts were not yet vocalised with dynamic mark positioning in fonts.
Adobe CS4 and CS5 officially doesn't support Arabic. Instead, there is a separate ME version (Middle Eastern) which supports left-to-right languages.
Some old text documents working with Arabic or Indic languages use 8-bit encoding, which required to use proprietary fonts. Such fonts can only use 256 glyphs, which is not sufficient for correct rendering of Devanagari (or other 10 Indic writing scripts).
TPTQ Arabic designs and develops Unicode-compliant fonts. Below are some instructions for using Unicode fonts to set Devanagari texts.
QuarkXPress® requires AXt fonts and Layout Ltd’s ArabicXT™ extension for setting Arabic text. AXt fonts are non-Unicode fonts, using the ‘Mac Roman’ encoding; Arabic glyphs are substituted for the Roman glyphs, so for example ‘alef’ replaces capital letter G.
TPTQ Arabic webfonts support all languages supported by their print versions. That’s over 200 languages, including those using Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic scripts.
In order to use Arabic fonts, you need to use special versions of InDesign, PhotoShop or Illustrator. These versions are labeled ME (Middle Eastern) and support bi-directional text setting for Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew. The regular version of Adobe CS3 doesnʼt support Arabic text setting.
Although the notion of serif/sans serif doesnʼt exist in Arabic typography, we created two different packages for Fedra Sans and Serif. Obviously only the Latin characters are serifed or not; the Arabic glyphs were then designed to match the typographic ʻcolourʼ of the text, so the Sans is slightly heavier than the Serif because...
We offer two different kinds of Arabic fonts: Fedra AR (Arabic), which supports only the Arabic and Mac Roman sets; and Fedra Multiscript, which offers the same Arabic support plus full Latin (Western, Turkish, Central, Eastern European), Greek and Cyrillic.
