Which font to use for examples?

[r12a]

It would be best to use freely accessible and open fonts for the examples in our documents, in order that anyone can easily create examples and maintain those in the future.

Which fonts should we use?

Scheherazade seems like a likely candidate: the quality is acceptable and opentype features are included.

Amiri may also be a good alternative?

Note that we are likely to need more than one font, since not all fonts have the same behaviour (eg. Scheherazade places the kasra below the shadda by default, whereas Amiri places it below the base character).

[sahafshar]

My vote is for Scheherazade for the main font. Can we maybe assign a primary font and along the road, if something is missing in the character set/OT features either bring it up with the developer (in this case, SIL) or use a second option (that also follows the requirements set by the group? If not, Amiri of course works quite nicely too.

[TitusNemeth]

As Richard said, the complexity of questions and diversity of topics suggests that multiple typefaces ought to be used. You may want to illustrate a specific point with one design, and another point with a different typeface. Because there are different technologies used, and different design strategies, you will likely need to compare things too.

So I think that it would be best to define a list of typefaces that can be used to show different things. This list should in all likelyhood reflect currently available typefaces with an open license that reflect professional type-making standards (or indeed problematic approaches that we want to highlight as examples of how something should not be done).

Amiri
Scheherazade
Lateef
Awami Nataliq
Noto Nastaliq
Noto Sans

[r12a]

My feeling is that we should pick one font for general use, and divert to other fonts only when we need to illustrate something particular. I think it's useful to have a list of 'pre-agreed' fonts, such as the list @TitusNemeth began to elaborate, from which to choose, or which we can extend. But we seem to be gravitating towards using Scheherazade as the main default choice.

So I put together a short wiki page, which we can use and extend to remind us of our choices. Please review and let me know what we should change.

If we decide to go with this, we should at some point redo the current examples, though i don't see that as a high priority at the moment.

[r12a]

You may find this test page useful. It tests whether the Scheherazade font features are supported in browsers (cf. the SIL page)

https://w3c..io/i18n-tests/exploratory/font-features/scheherazade.html

The last test is Graphite-only, so not surprising that it doesn't work. The others do quite well though in Firefox and Chrome, but not in Safari.