Arabic Fonts in the Linotype Library

Ahmed™ is a modern Arabic headline face, first produced by Linotype-Hell Ltd. in the early 1980s.

Originally developed as a simplified face, its design recalls the inscriptional and decorative tile work lettering of the medieval period. The strong treatment of the tails of certain characters departs from the more traditional style of tapering these finials, introducing a modern feel to the design.

The contrasting proportions of the tall vertical strokes and the rather elongated counters lend a monumental look to Ahmed, allowing its effective use in titling. During the later 1980s Ahmed was developed into a traditional typeface, with the introduction of medial forms to improve character spacing and balance. Recently, Ahmed has been converted into the OpenType font format, ensuring its continued popularity as a heading face for newspaper typesetting.

The Ahmed typeface contains two weights, Ahmed and Ahmed Outline. Both of the OpenType fonts include Latin glyphs from Clearface Gothic™ Roman inside the font files, allowing a single font to set text in both most Western European and Arabic languages

The two Ahmed OpenType fonts include 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.