Kawkab Mono Arabic Font

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  Kawkab Mono (كوكب مونو) is a monospaced Arabic typeface. It's designed for code and text-editing in particular, and whenever having a fixed-pitch font is necessary, such as when composing tabular data using text. There's a dearth in monospaced Arabic fonts and Kawkab comes to fill a void in this niche.
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  Available under the SIL Open Font License (OFL).
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  Source Code Pro was paired to provide non-Arabic glyphs.
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  Available in 3 weights: Light, Regular, and Bold.

Process

There wasn't much of a design philosophy. I tried to stick to certain criteria while drawing my glyphs by hand and then editing and refining the digital shapes using the Glyphs app. Here were some of my criteria:

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  The glyphs should have the same width.
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  It should be thicker yet narrower than Courier New (presently the most popular typeface used for monospaced Arabic).
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  It should combine Naskh and Kufic styles.
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  It should be somewhat beautiful and harmonious.

Owing to Arabic calligraphic demands on certain letters requiring nearly double the width that of normal characters, I've faced tremendous difficulty designing the Seen س, Sheen ش, Sad ص and Dhad ض letters. But that's all part of the challenge and allure of monospaced Arabic!

Meh!

I'm not extremely happy with the result either!

Being my first Arabic type design project, it's kind of expected to have many design faults and off-looking shapes.

My hope is that this project acts as a stepping stone for me and others to learn more about type design (especially Arabic type design). I also hope this raises awareness about monospaced Arabic which I believe hasn't seen much attention from type designers worldwide.

Roadmap

There's a lot left to be done here:

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  Improve outlines and make them more beautiful. Especially the ص and ض.
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  Add the remaining Arabic glyphs, including some frequently used Islamic ligatures.

Credits

The Amiri Font Project - I've adapted the `lellah` OpenType feature from Amiri. It's used to compose the word الله in various sequences.

Contributing

Kawkab Mono's source code is available on GitHub. Feedback & contributions are more than welcome.

You can also donate to support the Kawkab Mono project using Bitcoin. Please send your payment to the following address: