Adobe Arabic™

What is the Adobe Arabic™ font?

The Adobe Arabic typefaces were commissioned to from Tiro Typeworks and designed by Tim Holloway in 2004-05. The design brief was to create a type family that would meet the needs of modern business communications in all the languages supported by the Unicode Arabic character set: not just various forms of Arabic, but also Persian, Urdu, and many other central and south Asian languages written in the Arabic script and using distinctive letterforms and diacritics. The design needed to be clean and contemporary, and also to be readable on screen in, for example, interactive PDF forms. From the outset the two requirements of screen text clarity and linguistic versatility determined the basis of the design. More…
Clarity is achieved with enlarged, open counters reminiscent of simplified Arabic types.
But to extend the core Arabic glyph set to comfortably support additional languages, more flexible and varied principles were needed. Instead of trying to follow local naskh preferences in styling the non-Arab glyphs, risking disharmony, the design evolved by reference to the wider shared heritage of thuluth inscriptional forms.
This led to a more flowing joining line and the incorporation of calligraphically-informed variants and ligatures.
The extra stroke weight of the Bold was applied so that, in the same type size, the Bold does not appear bigger than its companion Regular so can be used within the line for emphasis as well as for headings.
The set of vocalization signs was tailored to permit their full use without the need to extend the text with tatweel. Vocalization and other marks are positioned dynamically using OpenType glyph positioning lookups. Note that Quranic marks and other purely religious characters are not supported by the fonts, since these fall outside the design brief for a modern communications type family.

Adobe Arabic™ Font families

The Adobe Arabic™ includes the following font families:

  • Adobe Arabic Regular
  • Adobe Arabic Italic
  • Adobe Arabic Bold
  • Adobe Arabic Bold Italic

Adobe Arabic™ Preview

Here is a preview of how Adobe Arabic™ will look. For more previews using your own text as an example, click here.


Is A free font? Is Free to Download?

No, is not free to download. You will need to pay for it I'm afraid. Almost every font that we list on HighFonts.com is a paid-for, premium font. We do have a Free Fonts section where we list free fonts that you can download. There is no point trying to find a free download of so please don't waste your time looking.

It is highly unlikely that you'll be able to find for free. There's a lot of websites that will say "Free Download" but these are just attempts to get you to click on a link which will either take you to an ad landing page or you risk getting viruses on your computer. In the rare occasion that you do find a free download for remember that it's illegal to use a font if you didn't pay for it!

If you really want and you want to truly own it the legal and safe way, then click here to visit the download and purchase page on MyFonts.com. Here you will be able to obtain the proper license. The designer and publisher deserves to be paid for their work, as they have put in the hours and the creativity to produce such an amazing font. Good luck with your purchase and future use of this font. :)