Persian Fonts

Font Download and Installation Instructions HERE for all downloadable fonts mentioned below on this page.

Info on how to get a much improved keyboard for your Windows computer is HERE.

Download each font separately. They come as zip files which you must unzip (extract) before installing.

If you are looking for the beautiful "Nazanin" font, that is called "Kayhan" in this set.

Note that you don't have to download special fonts to type Persian. The Times New Roman, Tahoma, Geeza Pro fonts
already on your computer will do the job and are also Unicode-compliant and work just fine.

2.  As we said above, there already exist some fonts on your computer that are shipped with all Windows (and Mac) computers which will suffice for Persian. You just didn't realize it because they have names like Times New Roman, Tahoma and Geeza Pro which don't sound very Persian but they do, in fact, contain the Persian subset.  Try them out, you'll see!  The advantage of these is that they are Unicode-compliant and when you send a typed document to a friend, you can rest assured he or she will not get a bunch of garbage characters due to not having the same font.  Tahoma is the most common font to be seen on Persian websites.  Unfortunately, beauty is not one of the attributes of these webfonts and the Persian connoisseur generally finds them difficult to look at, at least at first. Most Persian users have gradually made their peace with Tahoma and so there is hope for you too! The good thing about Tahoma is that it is well "hinted" and can be seen clearly at the smaller sizes and that is why it is more popular than Times New Roman and others which are really hard to see at low resolution/small font size.  

More info on Persian core fonts   HERE

Trivia on the origins of the word Tahoma:

Will the real Tahoma please stand up!

Another shot of Tahoma. (The building left, front is where this page was created!)

What "Tahoma" means HERE.

3. Persian Nasta`liq font:

Please get the recently improved beta version of  the "Iran Nastaliq" font from the makers at scict.ir. "IranNastaliq" was used to make these exercises for students of the Persian alphabet for training the retina to recognize "blocks" of script with a vertical as well as horizontal dimension.

If you prefer Urdu style nasta`liq, CRULP in Pakistan has been offering Nasta`liq
fonts for the past 5 years or so:
http://crulp.org/software/localization.htm

4. Here is a set of Unicode-compliant fonts being updated by the FarsiWeb team, a research and development project at Sharif FarsiWeb, Inc, Tehran.  These fonts are in the beta-testing stage right now and if you'd like to help troubleshoot bugs, you can download the zipped set for free.

5. The Arabic Typesetting font and Microsoft Uighur fonts are two fonts suitable for Persian. They ship with Vista and MS Office 2007. Both were made by Mamoun Sakkal.

7. Information on the pioneering of dynamic and smart Perso-Arabic fonts by Tom Milo of Decotype: Mim-esis

8. The Nazanin, Mitra, Yaghout, & Jadid, etc fonts were created by the Linotype Company.  It is interesting that so many of us who "grew up" on these beautiful fonts reject the look of the more modern fonts like Tahoma, Times New Roman or Geeza Pro even though all these fonts are modern inventions intended for machines and which are very different from pen and paper handwriting. Read a little about the history of the Linotype fonts brought to you by Fiona Ross, Timothy Holloway and others.

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This page was updated on 17 October 2012