This article describes how to set up Arabic language environment. It does not cover setting up Arabic input on the console.
Fonts
- ttf-amiriAUR — A classical Arabic typeface in Naskh style pioneered by Amiria Press. Its Latin characters are based on Crimson (otf-crimson) [1] [2]
- ttf-arabeyes-fontsAUR — Collection of free Arabic fonts
- ttf-qurancomplex-fontsAUR — Fonts by King Fahd Glorious Quran Printing Complex in al-Madinah al-Munawwarah
- ttf-sil-lateefAUR — Unicode Arabic font from SIL
- ttf-sil-scheherazadeAUR — Unicode Arabic font from SIL (Alternative for Traditional Arabic font)
Persian fonts:
Fonts with support for Arabic:
- ttf-dejavu-ibAUR — Dejavu fonts
Applications
Ayaspell offers Arabic spellchecking extensions for applications like Libreoffice, Firefox, and also system-wide dictionaries using hunspell-arAUR.
Libreoffice
- Enable Complex Text Layout: Tools > Options... > Language Settings > Languages > Default Languages for Documents.
- Install Ayaspell dictionary: Tools > Language > More Dictionaries Online > Arabic.
Troubleshooting
Common issues may be solved by checking Locale#Troubleshooting first. For problems related to text direction, check Bidi.
XKB Lam Alif problem
X keyboard layout sends Arabic ligature glyphs as a single glyph. For example, Laa+Alif ligature "لا" (U+0644, U+0627) is sent as "ﻻ" (U+FEFB), and similarly for (ﻷ، ﻵ، ﻹ). This is due to a known limitation in xkb which does not allow mapping a key to more than one character.
Workaround with X compose
If you have im-config
installed, you can use im-config -n xim
. Or alternatively, add the following to your environment variables:
XIM=none XIM_PROGRAM=/bin/true XIM_ARGS= GTK_IM_MODULE=xim QT_IM_MODULE=xim SHORT_DESC="X compose table"
Workaround with ibus
- Set ibus as an input method by running
im-chooser
or by setting the environment variables:GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus; QT_IM_MODULE=ibus; XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus
- Run
ibus-daemon
oribus-setup
if ibus is not set up. - Use ar-kbd-m17n as ibus input method.