A fun, minimalistic Persian pixel font.
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.
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.
Here is a subset of glyphs.
Install FontForge then build either using FontForge or the Makefile:
$ make
A font file should be generated in the same folder called noqte.ttf
.
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 2024Diacritics are not well-positioned: positioning improved using the aforementioned anchors- Lookup tables still incomplete
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.
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
Copyright 2022 Mehdi Sadeghi
Licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1, with Reserved Font Name Noqte.