I uploaded other screenshot
I don’t know about you but for me it’s day and night difference!
Nashk seems more formal, balanced and good size.
FYI, my wife next to me agree too 
I’ll run some screenshots through some people on my social circle and I’ll feedback.
As for Kufi, it’s a nice font, but not suitable in my opinion, it’s more Art than font.
I have a HiDpi screen, so I’ll do more extensive testing tomorrow.
Thanks
@xlmnxp
I just replicated what @mhsabbagh posted, see below:
The same happens with file names, it seems “Tashkeel” is the issue.
Noto Naskh Arabic UI seems fine however, did you observe anything different?
@xlmnxp, @munadi: Thanks for discussing this further. I would like to add two aspects to the discussion:
-
The choice between Noto Sans Arabic and Noto Naskh Arabic for sans-serif is one dimension. But what about the choice between UI vs. non-UI? It seems to me that you both focus primarily on how it looks in navigation menus etc. But what about large blocks of text? That’s one of the issues which @mhsabbagh pointed at.
-
@sulimanm mentioned an issue when rendering Arabic in a terminal window. Is that something you see too? It’s worth mentioning that the monospace font was changed to Noto Naskh Arabic.
- The choice between Noto Sans Arabic and Noto Naskh Arabic for sans-serif is one dimension. But what about the choice between UI vs. non-UI? It seems to me that you both focus primarily on
for my opinion Noto Naskh Arabic is so huge for UI and browsing
I will choose Noto Naskh Arabic UI for my daily uses because it match other Latins font hieght
how it looks in navigation menus etc. But what about large blocks of text? That’s one of the issues which @mhsabbagh pointed at.
it fixed but we should wait @mhsabbagh to answer us
- @sulimanm mentioned an issue when rendering Arabic in a terminal window. Is that something you see too? It’s worth mentioning that the monospace font was changed to Noto Naskh Arabic .
he mean when writing Arabic characters in terminal he will get spaces between characters
that because Noto Naskh/Sans Arabic isn’t use Fixed Pixels for characters
the only font I know support Fixed Pixels for Arabic is DejaVu
DejaVu
Noto Naskh Arabic UI
there spaces between Letters
I think this issue should fixed on terminal it self not by fontconfig
Note: Arabic Letters change it height and width by it location in the word
For exampleل, this letter has three cases of drawing
Prefix:لـ
Middle:ـلـ
Suffix:ـل
And it changes when written before some letters, such as “ا”, so it become “لا”, and after one of the following letters, “اورزؤ etc…” become “ل” and same thing for other Letters
If that’s the case, maybe we should go back to DejaVu for monospace? It could be done by simply dropping this section from the file:
<match target="pattern">
<test name="lang">
<string>ar</string>
</test>
<test qual="any" name="family">
<string>monospace</string>
</test>
<edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
<string>Noto Sans Mono</string>
<string>Noto Naskh Arabic</string>
</edit>
</match>
the problem only on Gnome Terminal
Noto Naskh/Sans work fine on Konsole from KDE
z
’
it can fixed inside Gnome Terminal
that will be good for now, until the issue fixed on Gnome Terminal
For UI elements, using Noto UI variants is a must in my opinion, without it controls/widget items grow in size and sometimes show broken, especially Qt apps.
As for blocks of text, see my screenshots above, Naskh Sans Arabic failed me, it seems it can’t handle Arabic diacritics correctly.
One disadvantage of using Noto Naskh Arabic UI is it’s relatively smaller compared to English, that’s when placed side by side, when UI is all in Arabic you won’t notice. However controls/widgets sizes is identical to English labeled ones, unlike the none-UI fonts, which makes the whole thing weird, and inconsistent size wise.
As for gnome-terminal, it expects mono fonts, which Noto aren’t, hence the spaces.
You can use that ugly old font for mono variants, or find a good looking Arabic mono font.
Are there any available ones you aware of, i.e. shipped with Ubuntu by default?
Further testing will be done today.
One of the ideas mentioned previously in this topic was to specify the font for both the sans-serif and ui-sans-serif generic font families; see this comment. The problem with that is that ui-sans-serif is a new invention, and seems not to be supported yet by e.g. GTK which picks the sans-serif font also for menus and widgets even if some other font is specified for ui-sans-serif.
So I take it that there is a consensus now to replace Noto Sans Arabic UI with Noto Naskh Arabic UI for sans-serif, at least for now.
Unfortunately I’m not aware of such a font, and neither is @xlmnxp. So I think we should go back to DejaVu for monospace for now.
1 Like
I have filed bug #1896397 about making these two adjustments:
-
Replace Noto Sans Arabic UI with Noto Naskh Arabic UI as default Arabic font for sans-serif
-
Drop the specification for monospace, and with that fall back to DejaVu for Arabic monospace
Are we agreed on those changes? Are they sufficient to address the issues mentioned above?
@mhsabbagh @munadi @sulimanm @URD @alawami-az @om26er any complain about that?
I’m agree
1 Like
@gunnarhj
Can we have the final .conf file to see the final proposed changes? I’ll test it on a fresh install.
As for fonts, I agree with the proposal.
Thanks.
1 Like
@xlmnxp No complaints from me 
1 Like
The final .conf file can be viewed here. I have uploaded it to groovy via language-selector 0.208, and it should be available in groovy-release in a few hours.
As regards Ubuntu 20.04, the process is more time consuming, so I’ll wait a few days before uploading there.
I have uploaded it to groovy via language-selector 0.208, and it should be available in groovy-release in a few hours.
Do you want me to install the lang pack manually, or just go through the setup like a fresh user and see what results I get that way?
Which do you prefer?
Also from Groovy onward, you said the installer will have some magic to prepare the correct fonts if Arabic locale is chosen, probably that’s the route to better test.
I can test different scenarios if you’re interested!
Thanks.
What’s most important currently is to test with the actual .conf file. It doesn’t matter much which way you choose to get it in place.
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.