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I was reading the other day a book in Arabic, and I remarked how concisely the Qurʾānic verses were written, compare for example how the verse in that picture (it's between those brackets, 7th line) is written compared with in this standard Arabic font:

لِمَا اخْتَلَفُوا فِيهِ مِنَ الْحَقِّ بِإِذْنِهِ ۗ وَاللَّهُ يَهْدِي مَن يَشَاءُ إِلَىٰ صِرَاطٍ مُّسْتَقِيمٍ

and

Is there any LaTeX package (or just a way in LaTeX) to achieve this particular style (preferably in an automated way, in which we get the desired result by just writing the chapter and number of the verse(s))? There's this one https://www.ctan.org/pkg/quran but it doesn't give the same style (it's more similar to the standard Arabic font)

I'm particularly interested since the book appears to have been typeset in LaTeX.

Thanks in advance

DELETE ME
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    I can't read the script so hard for me to say, but isn't this just a matter of choosing a different (more compact) font? If you have the document as pdf you can use pdffonts command or acrobat font menu to see which fonts are used. – David Carlisle Aug 11 '16 at 10:48
  • @DavidCarlisle thanks for the suggestion, I'm not dismissing entirely that possibility, I don't havve acrobat but I used this site https://everythingfonts.com/pdffonts, the analysis yielded unknown fonts... do you know someone which may be compatible with arabic fonts? – DELETE ME Aug 11 '16 at 11:22
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    I know nothing:-) there may be readers of this site who can just recognise the font style by eye, so just leave the question open, also I know that modern opentype fonts have a lot of code for contextual contractions and glyph shaping in arabic (and generally that works better in xetex than luatex at the current time) so choice of engine may matter as much as choice of font. – David Carlisle Aug 11 '16 at 11:53
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    David is right: some fonts have better contextual ligatures than others, and some have special ligatures for entire phrases. See https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/316719/7883 for examples of how different one text can look in different fonts. – Thérèse Aug 11 '16 at 16:26
  • There is arabtex, which is an old, ASCII input package, which does typeset arabic quite nicely, and I think would give a similar effect to the one you would like, but it's old technology, very cumbersome and inelegant to use. I think you are just better off selecting a different font that's more suited. Indeed, the main point about arabtex is the font it uses anyway, so ... – Au101 Aug 11 '16 at 17:47
  • Anyway, the font in your image looks like it's probably Scheherazade. It's easily available, you could start by trying that – Au101 Aug 11 '16 at 17:51
  • Those books are made with Microsoft Word using the Traditional Arabic font, and typically the Qurʾānic verses are typeset using this Word addon: https://quranword.net/project/quran-word-en/ You can get the exact same result as in your image using what I mentioned. I'm not aware of any way to automatically do that with LaTeX however. – al-Najashi Jul 05 '18 at 10:44

2 Answers2

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Khaled Hosny has created the font Amiri, which is, in his own words

a digital typeface to be used in typesetting Koranic verses.

It is is a revival of the beautiful typeface pioneered in early 20th century by Bulaq Press in Cairo, also known as Amiria Press, after which the font is named.

You can find the font here: Amiri Font.

You should note, though, that typesetting the Qurʾān is a very delicate task and computer typography may not yet be up to the task. For reference, please see the 1924 print edition from Cairo, for example.

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brian-ammon
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  • So i actually searched in the website of the King Fahd Complex for Printing the Quran in Medina, I visited one journal article that they published and it used the same font, I searched a bit more and found this which offers to download the Qur'an in 4 formats (including TrueTypeFont) I'll try that out and I'll publish an answer if it works perfectly – DELETE ME Aug 11 '16 at 20:19
  • Edit: Actually the TTF format is not available yet, only the TIF & Adobe Illustrator formats are available – DELETE ME Aug 11 '16 at 20:27
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Regarding LaTeX packages, there is arabtex. This is an older package, which can use ASCII input to produce some very nice typeset Arabic. Apparently, it also accepts UTF-8 input but I don't know how to work that. Although it has nice functionality, such as good typesetting and the ability to toggle between Arabic and transliteration and so on, I find it difficult to use, at least when supplying ASCII input.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\pagestyle{plain}
\usepackage[margin=1.8cm]{geometry}
\geometry{a4paper}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{arabtex}

\begin{document}

\begin{RLtext}\novocalize
  \setnashbf yqUl al'albAnI fI mqdmT .sfT al.slAT\setnash: \lq lmA kAn
  mU.dU` alktAb 'inmA hU byAn hdI alnbI .s"al_A al-lh `l"ayh waslm fI
  al.slAT; kAn mn albdhI 'an lA 'atqId fIh bm_dhb m`In; lalsbab al_dI
  mrr"a _dkr"um, wa-'inhA '"uwrd fIh mA _tbt `nh .s"al_A al-lh `l"ayh
  waslm - kmA hU m_dhb alm.hdd"i_tIn qdIm"aN w.hdI_t"aN - . wl_dlk
  fa-'in alktAb sIkUn - 'in ^sA' alalh ta`AlY"_a - jAm`"aN l^stAt mA
  tfrq fI b.tUn ktb al.hdI_t wAlfqh - `AlY"_a a_htlAf alm_dahb mamA lh
  `lAqT bmU.dU`h - , \setnashbf bInmA lA yjm` mA fIh mn al.hq 'ayy"u ktAb 'aw
  m_dhb, wsIkUn al`Aml bh - 'in ^sA' alalh - mamn qd hdAh alalh
  \setnash (\fullvocalize limA i_htalafUA fIhi mina al-.haqqi
  bi-'i_dnihi' wa-al-ll_ahu yahdiY" man" ya_ta--'A'u 'ilaY_a
  .sir_a.tiN mmustaqImiN) \novocalize [albqrT: 213] \rq
\end{RLtext}

\end{document}

enter image description here

To be completely honest with you, I think this properly belongs to the days before XeTeX.

It does produce very nice Arabic with a wide variety of ligatures and you do have a lot of control over the output (through various non-obvious means which may require some tracking down in the manual and may not be at all user-friendly), it doesn't seem to be capable of everything you want, such as the ﷺ ligature.

Instead, as others have said, I think you are just better off selecting a different font that's more suited. The font in your image looks like it's probably Scheherazade. It's easily available, you could start by trying that.

Au101
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