Works perfectly, thank you !
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Awesome. I’ve even tested it on Ubuntu 18.04 with the same files and it worked. 
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Is the solution available for Ubuntu 20.04?
Not yet. We are using bug #1891733, where you can follow the progress. But it will take a few more weeks.
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Progress: The solution is now available in Ubuntu 20.04 as well via language-selector-{common,gnome} 0.204.1.
That part remains to be implemented. Hopefully soon…
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Hi.
I was using my Ubuntu 20.04 in peace when suddenly I received an update that changed my default font family for Arabic. I have some notes and thoughts to share with you about that.
First of all, I have to say that I am quite surprised that Ubuntu changed the default font family for millions of users based on the feedback from 3-4 people posting in this forum. I do not know how things get done in Ubuntu but it is such a weird idea that this happened based on the feedback of a number of people less than the fingers in my right hand. Had it been for me - for example - I wouldn’t have pushed such huge change without hundreds or thousands of feedback.
And it is the reason why I am here; I noticed the change pushed to my machines and applied, although I wouldn’t expect a Linux distribution to change its font family 5 months after it was released (20.04).
The new font family used is actually less readable than the older one, in my opinion. The new one is too stylish, harder to use on smaller screens and too “artistic” to be used as a default font family. And to allow my non-Arabic speaking fellows to imagine it, it is like using the Lato font as default for your operating system. While Lato is quite good, just as Noto Sans Arabic UI, using it by default gives a quite weird feeling, especially for larger documents and texts. And this is important because the change you pushed also changed my web pages’ font, and hence all the Arabic texts I read each day.
I do agree that a change for the default font family for Arabic in Ubuntu was needed, however, placing it in the hands of the few fellows who commented here is quite unwise; You should’ve checked the scenarios of long texts placement, smaller screens situations, possible bugs and issues from a number of users before pushing such change. And what’s more unfortunate is that you didn’t apply it on a future release - like 20.10 - but instead, you pushed it back to the already-released 20.04 users. I had no idea such process was even allowed to happen.
One problem for example, is that the new font has a clear bug in displaying the “Arabic diacritics” like in the following image. Notice the huge space between the two letters in the middle of the first line:
Another problem is that the new font is too condensed; The height of the characters is considerably less than the other Arabic fonts, and space between words is too small when you are reading huge blocks of texts. I noticed this while viewing my Arabic blog posts that I wrote:
Compare it with the older font and notice how the text is more relaxed, easier to read and the space management is quite good:
Another issue, is that the space after some punctuation marks is quite huge comparing to the normal characters, giving them an unnatural feeling and making them harder to read (The white space after these marks are almost twice the white space after normal words, notice the areas I highlighted and compare them to the other white spaces):
Here’s the text with the older font, and notice how the white space size is identical both after the ending of normal words and also the punctuation marks:
Due to all of these reasons, I find it sad that Ubuntu rushed this process and decided to change the default font for millions of users (Think of schools, universities, enterprises, companies, organizations…) Just based on the feedback of 3-4 people in this forum thread.
If we are to fix the problem, then I believe a public poll for a number of suggested Arabic fonts should be created before such change is made. This could be helpful for 20.10 or other future releases.
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Greetings,
I came here just to say thanks to who raised this issue and fixed it. The older font was really unaesthetic at all, and a change was really needed.
However the new chosen font had some issues. Example: when Arabic characters printed inside the terminal (command line) you could see spaces between each character.
That could be fixed I believe, by choosing different font or maybe fix the current one. But I would strongly suggest not to go back to the old Arabic font.
Regards,
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He request more feedbacks and I post the link of this topic in your facebook group and other groups to give feedback but we didn’t get anything
Noto Sans Arabic is default font for Arabic in KDE NEON and KUbuntu for more then 3~ years
the font can be change and no problem in that
Other fonts make GTK applications huge and that can’t be fixed
Regardless of your posting in my Facebook group it doesn’t mean neither that I saw the post nor that I had time to look inside it.
And this doesn’t relate to the mentioned problems anyhow because in this way we would be 5 people instead of 4 deciding for the entire setting of Arabic fonts for millions of users, let alone the issue of pushing it backwards to 20.04.
The proper way of doing such huge design change would’ve been through a public poll accessible by most Arabic users, announced on Ubuntu’s social media platforms and other places so that a larger number of feedbacks can be retrieved. And then it gets shipped in newer versions rather than the already-released version 5 months ago.
I definitely agree that the old font is ugly and needs to be changed, but the new one suffers from bugs as I mentioned.
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below there Writer file that content the name of Arabic fonts with it package name in repos
it can be used for make an poll
https://mega.nz/file/rtgTHbxR#D0tvrTcBZTBmflDMTndF_51e7Mc7g4PX1HSXeoDC5WU
@mhsabbagh, @sulimanm: Thanks for your feedback!
First a comment about relying on the opinions of a small group of users. I have helped with changing default fonts a few times during the past few years, and that’s how it’s typically done. We simply don’t have the resources and channels to gather opinions from a large group of users of a specific non-latin script. After all, the way to exercise influence on Ubuntu development is to get involved in the development. 
It’s true that it was a bit bold to backport the change to 20.04. Maybe it was a mistake by me to do that. I had let myself be convinced that the change was indisputably a step in the right direction. OTOH, please note that the change was uploaded to groovy on August 16. We didn’t receive a single complaint from Arabic speaking users, so a little over three weeks later the change was made in 20.04. Precisely that measure lead to the extended feedback you are now providing. We’ll of course try to address apparent issues.
I think that’s a result of the choice to use Noto Sans Arabic UI instead of Noto Sans Arabic. That particular choice has been discussed previously in this topic. There is a conflict of goals here, and maybe we need to decide which is more important: The look of certain menus for navigation or the impression when viewing large blocks of text.
Good.
May I humbly suggest that we focus on trying to address those issues.
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This has now been implemented, and I have confirmed that it works as intended via the latest groovy and focal daily builds. So, provided that you are connected to internet when installing, it will work with the Ubuntu 20.10 ISO. As regards focal it will work only with the ISO for the Ubuntu 20.04.2 point release.
Another thing is the specific font used. The key file for the new default behavior is /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-ar.conf, and line 13 of that file looks like this:
<string>Noto Sans Arabic UI</string>
If you want to check out alternative sans-serif fonts, a first advice would be to replace that line with:
<string>Noto Sans Arabic</string>
<string>Noto Naskh Arabic UI</string>
<string>Noto Naskh Arabic</string>
one after the other.
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I tried it and work fine! 
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Hi,
Thank you all for the above.
I just want to say, anything proposed above is better than the old default.
However, I came here to say that Noto Naskh Arabic UI is way better than Noto Sans Arabic.
As one previous guy said, it’s (arguably) the best Arabic font out there, and it is also used by default on Android.
If we can have a vote, you know what my choice will be 
Regards.
Here is some comparison between the two on an app I’m working on:
[quote=“gunnarhj, post:99, topic:14573”]
The new language-selector package has made it to groovy now, but unfortunately I noticed a problem. It seems like we need to state DejaVu explicitly for monospace to make DejaVu the effective font in e.g. gnome-terminal. So I’m about to make yet another change.
[/quote]
I tested the latest .conf it seems the issue still present, DejaVu is not being picked up for mono: https://git.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-desktop/ubuntu/+source/language-selector/tree/fontconfig/69-language-selector-ar.conf
Another shot:
Thanks for your feedback! I suppose that it’s in the first of your two screenshots where Noto Naskh Arabic UI is the effective font.
What do you say @xlmnxp? You were the one who proposed the currently used sans-serif font. Naskh was indeed mentioned in the discussion, but not really assessed.
@gunnarhj
Sorry, forgot to label the images.
Correct, first is Noto Naskh Arabic UI, the second is Naskh Sans Arabic UI.
@xlmnxp
Thanks for being active!
I don’t see any Naskh font on any of the screenshots!
I say feel free to make a poll, but remember this, all fonts above are made by Google, and they themselves decide on Noto Naskh Arabic UI as a default on Android, and that’s for a good reason I believe (not sure if they ran a poll, or did internal testing … etc).