Print vs screen

On paper the letter is ink, and a press can hold a stroke far finer than the eye needs. That is why high-contrast faces — thick stems beside hairline connections — look elegant in a printed book. The paper carries the thin stroke, and the contrast reads as refinement rather than as damage.

A screen builds the same letter out of pixels. At body sizes a hairline is thinner than one pixel, so the rasteriser renders it as a pale grey smudge or drops it altogether. The thick parts stay dark and the thin parts fade, and Arabic-script words start to look like a row of dark blobs with the connections washed out.

The reverse is also true. A face drawn for screens keeps its strokes even and its joins sturdy, and that evenness can read as flat and mechanical when it is printed large. One file rarely serves both jobs well. Decide which medium the text really lives in, and choose for that one.

Rasterising is the decision about which pixels to darken. At the sizes body text actually runs, a Kurdish line is not many pixels tall, and the details that tell the letters apart are one or two pixels wide: the teeth of س and ش, the dots on چ, ژ and ڤ, and the short stroke that carries one letter into the next.

Hinting is the instruction set inside the font that tells the rasteriser how to snap outlines onto the pixel grid. Rendering engines differ in how much of it they honour, and some ignore nearly all of it and rely on greyscale antialiasing instead. Either way, below a certain size three teeth become one grey bump and stacked dots merge into a smear. No CSS fixes that.

What you can control is the face and the size. Prefer a face whose detail is drawn robustly for small sizes — teeth with visible gaps between them, dots large enough to stay separate, joins with real weight — and raise the size when the face is too fine for the job. Look at it at the size you will ship, not zoomed in.

Arabic script joins along the baseline, so where two letters meet their strokes overlap. Add weight and that overlap thickens faster than the letter bodies do. At the heaviest weights the joins blot into a solid bar, and counters — the eye of ص, the loop of ع — fill in and close.

The medium moves this in both directions. Ink spreads slightly on paper, so a heavy weight prints heavier than it looked on your monitor, and uncoated stock spreads it more. Light text on a dark screen blooms and also looks heavier than it measures. Judge a heavy weight in the medium it will be used in, not in your design tool.

Then there is faked bold. When you ask for a bold the family does not contain, the software manufactures one by thickening the outline, and in Arabic script that smears the joins and closes the counters at once. It looks like a bad print, on any medium. Before you design around a weight, confirm the family actually ships it.

At the same point size, Arabic-script text reads smaller than Latin. The letter's box has to hold tall ascenders, deep descenders and space above for marks, so the main body of the letters takes up less of it. Kurdish set at the size that suited your Latin body text will look smaller and lighter than you intended.

In mixed text this shows up in every sentence, because brand names, URLs and numerals arrive in Latin. Either choose an Arabic-script face whose letter body matches the Latin face's x-height, or set the two sizes separately rather than letting one value cover both. font-size-adjust is one way; a separate rule for the Latin span is another.

Kurdish also needs more leading than Latin. Ascenders and descenders are longer, and although Kurdish writes most of its vowels as letters rather than marks, marks still turn up — in Arabic quotations, in names, in religious text — and they sit above the line. Tight leading collides a descender on one line with an ascender or a mark on the next, so start looser than your Latin default and tighten only if the block looks loose.

Print a real proof. Same size, same paper, same printer as the finished job. You cannot tell from a monitor whether a hairline survives on uncoated stock, and a page shown at 100% on a large bright screen is not the page. For print work use the file you download here, which is the unmodified original — the WOFF2 files are derived assets for preview and web use.

Test on a real phone. A desktop mockup is a big screen at arm's length; a phone is a small one held closer, often outdoors, often dimmed. Load the actual page on the actual device, in the light you expect people to read it in. Most small-size problems become obvious there within a second and never show up in the mockup.

Our badges cannot answer this question for you. They tell you a font shapes Kurdish correctly — every base letter present, joining that works with the Kurdish language tag applied — and they say nothing about whether it holds at 12px or on newsprint. That part is a judgement, and the only way to make it is to look.