I agree that most arabic font tend to be smaller than their latin counterpart...
Having said that, under Microsft environtment, most font looks OK for small sizes, I think because most of them (normally at 12 pt) are redered gridfitted only, without greyscale rendering. That's why it looks clear. However, this is mostly true for Latin font. For Arabic font that has a clear looks at small size, I think the only only that is good (at small size, at bigger size it is not) is Tahoma. It is all down to hinting. Most font distributed with MS platform are hinted heavily, while most of the free fonts are not. Of course, we can use a bigger font, but that, IMHO does not solve the problem. What we really need a good, hinted truetype font. However, that is only half of the solution, since most linux distribution out there does not understand truetype hints. However, hope is still not lost. Instead of using truetype hints, we can embed a bitmap info into truetype font. The "ONLY" software that can do this AFAIK is fontforge, which is great news to all of us. So, what we really need now is, someone to come up with the bitmap font design that can match any existing truetype outline face. An excellent example of bitmap font face is the one used to display the Quran at al-islam.com . The font was designed by Sakhr, later Harf. However, the image of the Quran pages is widely use on the internet, so I don't know how they protect their IP. However, I would advise to stay away from their design to avoid problems later. So, if anyone would like to design the bitmap font, I can help to embed it to the exsiting font. This will solved most of our font problem. Anyone?
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