Overview of Arabic fonts available for LaTeX/XeTeX?

Question

Is there an overview available for Arabic fonts in LaTeX / XeTeX?

• Ideally with output examples, so that it becomes clear how they compare.
• So far, I'm aware of
  • Geeza Pro,
  • Amiri (and its variants),
  • Sheherazade and,
  • Al Nile.

But I assume there is much more out there.

Answer 1

In texmf-dist/doc/latex/arabi/user_guide.pdf, pages 50–51 give samples of fonts from Microsoft and from arabeyes.org (there are .ttf versions of the latter in Debian’s fonts-arabeyes package). And the documentation for dad shows examples of its output. Of course, with xetex and luatex, you can use any unicode, OpenType font, whether free or commercial. Here are some free fonts:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[novoc]{arabluatex}
\linespread{1.25}
\newcommand{\sample}{\arb{الأفكار الخضراء عديمة اللون تنام بغضب}}% http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/colorlessgreenideas.htm
\begin{document}
Amiri: \sample% arabluatex defaults to Amiri
\newfontfamily\arabicfont[Script=Arabic]{Aref Ruqaa}
Aref Ruqaa: \sample% https://github.com/khaledhosny/aref-ruqaa
\newfontfamily\arabicfont[Script=Arabic]{Cairo}
Cairo: \sample% https://github.com/Gue3bara/Cairo
\newfontfamily\arabicfont[Script=Arabic]{Hussaini Nastaleeq}
Hussaini Nastaleeq: \sample% https://github.com/khaledhosny/hussaini-nastaleeq
\newfontfamily\arabicfont[Script=Arabic]{Jomhuria}
Jomhuria: \sample% https://github.com/khaledhosny/Jomhuria
\newfontfamily\arabicfont[Script=Arabic]{Lateef}
Lateef: \sample% http://software.sil.org/arabicfonts/
\newfontfamily\arabicfont[Script=Arabic]{Mada}
Mada: \sample% https://github.com/khaledhosny/mada
\newfontfamily\arabicfont[Script=Arabic]{Noto Kufi Arabic}
Noto Kufi: \sample% https://www.google.com/get/noto/
\newfontfamily\arabicfont[Script=Arabic]{Noto Naskh Arabic}
Noto Naskh: \sample% https://www.google.com/get/noto/
\newfontfamily\arabicfont[Script=Arabic]{Reem Kufi}
Reem Kufi: \sample% https://github.com/khaledhosny/reem-kufi
\newfontfamily\arabicfont[Script=Arabic]{Scheherazade}
Scheherazade: \sample% http://software.sil.org/arabicfonts/
\end{document}

You can get a list of Arabic fonts available on your computer by typing fc-list :lang=ar on the command line, and you can search for all Arabic Google fonts.

Update: Here’s the brand new FiraGO, an extension of Fira Sans which adds support for Arabic, Devanagari, Georgian, Hebrew, and Thai to the already impressive range of Fira Sans:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[novoc]{arabluatex}
\newcommand{\sample}{\txarb{الأفكار الخضراء عديمة اللون تنام بغضب}}
\begin{document}
\newfontfamily\arabicfont[Script=Arabic]{FiraGO}
FiraGO: \sample% https://github.com/bBoxType/FiraGO
\end{document}

Update two: Here is the new Kafa Black:

and its stylistic alternate:

Update three: Recently, IBM Plex Arabic has joined the IBM Plex family:

Update four: Here’s Aref Ruqaa compiled with lualatex-dev:

Update five: Here are Cairo, El-Messiri, and Lemonada, by Mohamed Gaber:

Update six: Abd ElRady, by AhmED ElqSas:

Update seven: As of 5 November 2020, there’s also Scheherazade New, which can be installed alongside the older Scheherazade; the new version has resized glyphs:

Answer 2

In practical, real-world use, most authors today will save the source in UTF-8, load a TrueType or OpenType Arabic font, and compile with XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX. A list of TrueType or OpenType Arabic fonts would not be specific to TeX or LaTeX. There are a few additions to that list that are worth noting for someone working in LaTeX, however.

In the Modern Toolchain

Khaled Hosny, the designer of Amiri, also created the Libertinus font family (based on free fonts by Philipp H. Poll), which make excellent companion fonts to Amiri—and, particularly relevant to LaTeX, include an OpenType math font, Libertinus Math. Hosny also made XITS Math, converted and extended the STIX fonts. Libertinus and XITS have the best support for Arabic and Persian mathematics of any free font, as well as other features most other math fonts lack, including support for \boldmath. (Dr. Hosny also collaborated on one other OpenType math font, Neo Euler, but it has none of these features and is incomplete.)

Arabic Latin Modern Fixed is a monospaced Arabic font based on Computer Modern, and very suitable for the typewriter font with Babel or Polyglossia.

The Noto family is useful for multilingual documents, as it comes in a number of styles to match other fonts and covers all the world’s scripts.

Classic Packages

There are some Arabic fonts for legacy packages, which you might still need to compile an old document, and I’ve occasionally still seen in use. Conventional seven- and eight-bit encodings were never very suitable for Arabic, but the arabtex package defined the xnsh14 pseudo-font, and also supported an older nash14 pseudo-font, as well as bold variants. The original sources for these are in METAFONT. The farsitex package is similar.

The arabi package offers different local encodings for Arabic and Farsi. There is a table in the manual of the fonts it supports. Of these, the Arabeyes Project fonts were also available in a PostScript format.

There were never any other Arabic fonts made specifically for TeX, at least that are still available from CTAN.

Answer 3

\documentclass[14pt]{article}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setdefaultlanguage[calendar=gregorian,numerals=maghrib]{arabic}
\setotherlanguage{french}
\newfontfamily\arabicfont[Script=Arabic, Scale=1.0]{Amiri}

\begin{document}
    النص بالعربية
\end{document}