Alkalami

Try Alkalami

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Alkalami Regular

About Alkalami

Alkalami is a typeface for Arabic script in a West African manuscript style. Its name is the local word for the qalam, a sharpened stick used to write on wooden boards around Kano in Nigeria and in Niger, and that tool explains the look: the stroke along the baseline is very thick, while ascenders, teeth and other verticals are narrow by comparison. Swashes and descenders reach far below the line, so the design needs generous line spacing, and a set page appears as a dense black rectangle. Vowel marks and other diacritics are much smaller and sit close to the letters. The family is one Regular style with 982 glyphs. Its Latin, shown in the specimen, is a dark old-style serif limited to the basic subset. The font file names Becca Hirsbrunner Spalinger as designer.

Where Alkalami works

Ajami texts from the Kano region

The letterforms follow the hand used there, so readers meet a familiar style of Arabic script.

Religious and literacy publications

A script that mirrors writing on wooden boards suits material for communities taught in that tradition.

Titles and book covers

The heavy baseline stroke gives a title strong presence even without a bold weight.

Bilingual headings

The dark Latin serif sets an English or French title beside the Arabic at similar blackness.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Estonian

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Arabic. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: arabic, latin. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Alkalami

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Alkalami on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Alkalami";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Alkalami-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Alkalami", serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Alkalami with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Alkalami&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Needs extra line spacing

Deep swashes and descenders require a taller line height than most Arabic text faces.

One weight

Alkalami has a single Regular style. Its Latin already looks bold, and there is no lighter or heavier companion.

Small diacritics

Marks are drawn much smaller than the base letters and close to them, which is part of the regional style.

Latin is basic

Latin coverage is limited to the basic subset for Western European languages.

FAQs

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All serif fonts