Index of /CTAN/fonts/alkalami/
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This is the README for alkalami version 1.000 (2017-05-30).
Alkalami is designed for Arabic-based writing systems in
the Kano region of Nigeria and Niger. Alkalami (pronounced
al-KA-la-mi) is the local word for the Arabic "qalam", a
type of sharpened stick used for writing on wooden boards
in the Kano region of Nigeria and in Niger, and what gives
the style its distinct appearance. The baseline stroke is
very thick and solid. The ascenders and other vertical
strokes including the teeth are very narrow when compared
to the baseline. A generous line height is necessary to
allow for deep swashes and descenders, and the overall look
of the page is a very black, solid rectangle. Diacritics
are much smaller in scale, with very little distance from
the main letters.
Alkalami supports a subset of the Unicode 9.0 Arabic
character repertoire. It only includes characters known to
be used in Modern Standard Arabic and characters known to
be necessary in a few West African languages.
Font smarts are implemented using the OpenType technology.
A number of glyph variations are accessible through
Stylistic Sets available via the OpenType technology.
Alkalami is released under the SIL Open Font License.
Alkalami is a trademark of SIL International.
See OFL.txt for details of the SIL Open Font License.
For further information about this font, including Unicode
ranges supported, OpenType font features and how to use
them, and licensing, please see the documentation on the
website (http://software.sil.org/alkalami/) or in the
documentation subfolder of this font package.
Encoding:
The fonts are encoded according to Unicode, so your
application must support Unicode text in order to access
letters. For Arabic text, your application must be able to
handle Right to Left text as well as the initial, medial,
final forms of each Arabic letter. You will also need some
way of entering Unicode text into your document.
Keyboarding:
This font does not include any keyboarding helps or
utilities. You may use the built-in keyboards of the
operating system. You may also need to install an
appropriate keyboard and input method for the characters
of the language you wish to use. If you want to enter
characters that are not supported by any system keyboard,
the Keyman program (www.keyman.com) can be helpful on
Windows systems. Also available for Windows is MSKLC
(http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/msklc.mspx).
For other platforms, KMFL (http://kmfl.sourceforge.net/),
XKB (http://www.x.org/wiki/XKB) or Ukelele
(http://scripts.sil.org/ukelele) can be helpful.
If you want to enter characters that are not supported
by any system keyboard, and to access the full Unicode
range, you might try charmap.exe on Windows or, on Ubuntu
or similar software, gucharmap or kcharselect.
Another method of entering some symbols is provided by a
few applications such as Adobe InDesign or LibreOffice.org.
They can display a glyph palette or input dialog that shows
all the glyphs (symbols) in a font and allow you to enter
them by clicking on the glyph you want.
Rendering:
This font is designed to work with the OpenType technology.
To take advantage of the advanced typographic capabilities
of this font, you must be using applications that provide
an adequate level of support for OpenType.
For more information see the Alkalami website:
http://software.sil.org/alkalami/
This CTAN package was packaged by Bob Tennent
rdt(at)cs.queensu.ca.