Kurdish typography

The Central Kurdish variety Sorani is mainly written using an Arabic alphabet with 33 letters. Unlike the regular Arabic script, which is an abjad, Kurdish Arabic is an alphabet in which vowels are mandatory.

Table of Unicode characters used in Kurdish-Arabic script

Non-letter characters in addition to punctuation marks and symbols are:

• Tatweel (U+0640), used to stretch characters.
• Zero width non-joiner (U+200C). Usage of the ZWNJ is non-standard but occurs a lot, most of the time this is due to poor conversions from non-Unicode to Unicode mapping in texts.

Kurdish Unicode fonts

Non-Unicode fonts

Ali fonts

Alifonts, widely used with Windows 98, enabled typing of Kurdish with Arabic or Farsi keyboard layouts. While it uses a non-standard mapping, typing Kurdish with Alifonts remains popular, as it does not require a specific Kurdish keyboard layout.

Ribaz fonts

Ribaz Font, 99 non-Unicode fonts suited from Arabic fonts. file

Zanest fonts

Download zanest fonts 1994

Dilan fonts

Converting to Unicode

• http://www.transliteration.kpr.eu/ku/en.html Kurdî Nûs], a versatile tool for converting to Unicode and Kurdish Latin by pellk Software Development Institute.
• KurdITGroup's font converter, for converting non-Unicode fonts to Unicode.

Beware: Some old converters convert Teh Marbuta (0629) to Heh + ZWNJ (0647 200C) instead of the correct Ae (06D5)!

Most converters don't retain formatting through non-joiners and therefore give a slightly different, albeit more standard, rendering.

Web fonts

• Unikurd Web: for 10, 11 and 12 pt
• Tahoma & Tahoma Bold
• Times New Roman
• Arial

See also

• Kurdish alphabet