Arabic Fonts in the Linotype Library

Maged™, a traditional-style Arabic text face, enjoyed widespread popularity as a dry-transfer typeface prior to being licensed by Letera Arabica to Linotype-Hell for font production. In consultation with the Linotype Design Studio (U.K.), the artwork was redrawn by Adrian Williams to render the typeface into a complete, unitized Arabic font with a full complement of traditional-style ligatures suitable for digitization. Maged, which has two weights, first appeared as a 202 font in 1987 before its eventual conversion to OpenType in 2005.

Thus Linotype’s Maged font can be described as a trend-setting modern Naskh design that retains a sense of the fluidity of Naskh calligraphy: the letters, when composed, appear as freshly-written text characterized by rich, inky horizontals, tapering swash strokes and contrasting delicate ascenders. The Bold exploits these features of the Regular without excess, tempered by the need for clarity at smaller sizes.

Maged Regular and Bold are eminently suited to text and titling in broader column work (brochures, magazines, advertising, coffee-table books etc.,) and are thus able to extend the range of the Linotype Arabic library in areas of work where the more compact text and titling fonts would create a too concentrated effect

Both of the Maged fonts ship in the OpenType format, and include Latin glyphs (from Palatino™ Medium and Palatino™ Black)
inside the font files, allowing a single font to set text in both most Western European and Arabic languages. Maged’s OpenType code pages incorporate the Basic Latin character set (Western CP 1252 Latin 1/ANSI and Macintosh US Roman) and the Arabic character set (CP 1256), which supports Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. They include tabular and proportional Arabic, Persian, and Urdu numerals, as well as a set of tabular European (Latin) numerals.