Scheherazade New is a smart open font designed by SIL International. It is designed as a general-purpose Arabic style and is intended to support most of the characters in the Unicode 14.0 Arabic blocks (excluding the Arabic Presentation Forms blocks, which are not recommended for normal use).
Scheherazade New v3.300 has been released.
Scheherazade New is a mature product with no major changes anticipated. We will be releasing maintenance updates to fix bugs.
For copyright and licensing information - including any Reserved Font Names - see OFL.txt.
For practical information about using, modifying and redistributing this font see OFL-FAQ.txt.
For more details about this project, including its design history and acknowledgements see FONTLOG.txt.
For further information, including Unicode ranges supported, Graphite and OpenType font features and how to use them, please see the documentation on software.sil.org/scheherazade or in the documentation subfolder.
This project uses a UFO-based design and production workflow, with all sources in open formats and a completely open-source build toolkit. For more details see SIL Font Development Notes.
We welcome contributions to this font project, such as new glyphs, enhanced smart font code, or bug fixes. The best way to begin the process is to file an issue in the Github project or respond to an existing issue and express your interest. Then we can begin to correspond with you regarding what all might be required and discuss how to best submit your contributions.
To enable us to accept contributions in a way that honors your contribution and respects your copyright while preserving long-term flexibility for open source licensing, you would also need to agree to the SIL International Contributor License Agreement for Font Software (v1.0) prior to sending us your contribution. To read more about this requirement and find out how to submit the required form, please visit the CLA information page.
The Scheherazade New project can be built from source using smith. This is done via the sequence:
smith distclean
smith configure
smith build
smith alltests
Because of the complex kerning and collision avoidance logic, builds can take up to 15 minutes or longer, depending on hardware. If the complex kerning is not needed (such as for debugging other font logic), the --quick parameter can be supplied:
smith distclean
smith configure
smith build --quick
The resulting files will not have functional kerning or collision avoidance, but will be otherwise usable.
After base characters to the font, the following files will also need updating:
glyph_data.csv-- used to set glyph orders and psnames in the built fontclasses.xml-- used to define classes used by both OpenType and Graphiteopentype/*.fea-- modify as needed to add needed OpenType behaviorgraphite/*.gd*-- modify as needed to add needed Graphite behaviortests/*.ftml-- see below
After adding characters or additional behaviors to the font, test files should be created or enhanced to test the new behaviors. The test files:
tests/AllChars.ftmltests/ALsorted.ftmltests/DaggerAlef.ftmltests/Diac.ftmltests/Diac-short.ftmltests/Kern.ftmltests/SubtendingMarks.ftmltests/Yehbarree.ftml
are generated automatically using tools/bin/genftmlfiles.sh.
tools/ftml.xsl can be used to view ftml documents directly in Firefox (which supports both Graphite and OpenType rendering).
However, in order for Firefox to access the .xsl file, you need to relax its "strict URI" policy by going to about:config and setting security.fileuri.strict_origin_policy to false.
Once you have this setting in effect, you can load the FTML documents directly into Firefox and see the built font rendered.
See all the details in the SIL FontDev guide.