Localization/Arabic

This article describes how to set up Arabic language environment. It does not cover setting up Arabic input on the console.

Fonts

ttf-amiri^AUR — A classical Arabic typeface in Naskh style pioneered by Amiria Press. Its Latin characters are based on Crimson (otf-crimson)
ttf-arabeyes-fonts^AUR — Collection of free Arabic fonts
ttf-qurancomplex-fonts^AUR — Fonts by King Fahd Glorious Quran Printing Complex in al-Madinah al-Munawwarah
ttf-sil-lateef^AUR — Unicode Arabic font from SIL
ttf-sil-scheherazade^AUR — Unicode Arabic font from SIL (Alternative for Traditional Arabic font)

Persian fonts:

vazirmatn-fonts^AUR

Fonts with support for Arabic:

ttf-dejavu-ib^AUR — Dejavu fonts

Applications

Bidirectional text includes text direction support among applications. In particular, Firefox Ctrl+Shift+X is the only supported shortcut for switching text direction.

Ayaspell offers Arabic spellchecking extensions for applications like LibreOffice, Firefox, and also system-wide dictionaries using .

Libreoffice

Enable Complex Text Layout: Tools > Options... > Language Settings > Languages > Default Languages for Documents.
Install Ayaspell dictionary: Tools > Language > More Dictionaries Online > Arabic.

Troubleshooting

Common issues may be solved by checking Locale#Troubleshooting first. For problems related to text direction, check Bidi.

XKB Lam Alif problem

X keyboard layout sends Arabic ligature glyphs as a single glyph. For example, Laa+Alif ligature "لا" (U+0644, U+0627) is sent as "ﻻ" (U+FEFB), and similarly for (ﻷ، ﻵ، ﻹ). This is due to a known limitation in xkb which does not allow mapping a key to more than one character.

Workaround with X compose

If you have installed, you can use . Or alternatively, add the following to your environment variables:

XIM=none
XIM_PROGRAM=/bin/true
XIM_ARGS=
GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
QT_IM_MODULE=xim
SHORT_DESC="X compose table"

If XIM is set as the default input method, then XCompose table offers additional Arabic letters like: گ، ڤ، چ، پ, quotes «», as well as Wikipedia:Zero-width non-joiner, by pressing the AltGr key. The default compose table is located in .

Workaround with ibus

Set ibus as an input method by running or by setting the environment variables:
Run ibus-daemon or if ibus is not set up.
Use ar-kbd-m17n as ibus input method.

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