Arabic Fonts in the Linotype Library

Yakout™ is an Arabic text face that was developed by Linotype & Machinery in 1956 for hot-metal typesetting. Similar to the typewriter fonts created during this period, it utilises a limited range of letterforms to represent a full Arabic characer set, thus forming a style of type design known as Simplified Arabic. The skilful reshaping of letterforms demanded by the constraints of the original restrictive technology has given Yakout a very dynamic effect, and has helped to produce a design whose overall pattern works particularly well in newspaper setting.

Digital technology has enhanced the original design by permitting the introduction of wide characters and some additional letterforms, and by improving the joining of the strong, slightly curved baseline.

Yakout is available in two OpenType weights: Yakout Light and Yakout Bold. Both of the fonts include Latin glyphs (from Times™ Europa Roman and Times™ Europa Bold, respectively) inside the font files, allowing a single font to set text in both most Western European and Arabic languages.

Yakout incorporate the Basic Latin character set (Western CP 1252 Latin 1/ANSI and Macintosh US Roman) and support all languages that use the Arabic script. They include tabular and proportional Arabic, Persian, and Urdu numerals and a set of tabular European (Latin) numerals.