Harmattan

Harmattan, named after the trade winds that blow during the winter in West Africa, is designed in a Warsh style to suit the needs of languages using the Arabic script in West Africa.

This font provides a simplified rendering of Arabic script, using basic connecting glyphs but not including a wide variety of additional ligatures or contextual alternates (only the required lam-alef ligatures.)

Harmattan Version 2.000 (released in June 2020) now includes a Bold style and contains near complete coverage of all the characters defined in Unicode 13.0 for Arabic script (excluding the Arabic Presentation Forms blocks, which are not recommended for normal use). It has full support for the Arabic and Arabic Supplement Unicode blocks, and the Arabic Extended-A block with the exception of U+08D3..U+08E2.

In 2023 an additional two weights for this typeface family were added for a total of four weights now. The glyphset was expanded to support all of the Unicode 15.0 character set. Support for the Kyrgyz language was added.

Bob Hallissy does Graphite, OpenType, and TypeTuner code, and build support. Becca Hirsbrunner is the Lead Designer. George W. Nuss is the Original Designer. Iska Routamaa is a Contributing Designer. The Harmattan project is maintained by SIL International. Harmattan is released under the SIL Open Font License. Harmattan is a trademark of SIL International.

For further information about this font, including Unicode ranges supported, Graphite and OpenType font features and how to use them, and licensing, please see the documentation on the website software.sil.org/Harmattan. To contribute, see github.com/silnrsi/font-harmattan.