I have installed Arabic language support using the language tool, but I am still unable to get this page to render correctly:
http://www.iamcal.com/understanding-bidirectional-text/
Which fonts do I need to install to stop seeing squares instead of Arabic characters? I would prefer fonts that are available in the Ubuntu repositories.
Currently, fonts-hosny-amiri has the best Unicode coverage in my experience. Amiri is an Arabic Naskh style typographically oriented font.
Description:
Amiri is a classical Arabic typeface in Naskh style for typesetting books and other running text.
Its design is a revival of the beautiful typeface pioneered in early 20th century by Bulaq Press in Cairo, also known as Amiria Press, after which the font is named.
Amiri font covers the full Unicode 6.0 Arabic and Arabic Supplement blocks, as well as the compatibility Arabic Presentation Forms-A and B blocks.
Installation instructions:
Enable universe repository
sudo apt-add-repository universe
Update package list
sudo apt-get update
Install the Amiri font
sudo apt-get install fonts-hosny-amiri
It is available in most Debian derivatives:
There are few other beautiful fonts listed in Tanzil project. AFAIK, they don't cover completely the Arabic blocks in Unicode or have bad alignment with Latin script because some aim for Quran or pure Arabic text only not for mixed scripts.
The Language Support section in Ubuntu lets you change the interface language, in other words, the menus, panels and other elements. It has nothing to do with the way a web page is displayed.
I am no expert in Arabic, but usually, if a web page is not displayed correctly, what you need to change is its character encoding,
View -> Character Encoding in Firefox.
The source code of the page has the following:
charset=UTF-8
font-family: georgia, helvetica, times new roman, serif;
Ubuntu font now supports arabic. It will be the default for ubuntu 16.04. You can download and try the font now from here:
