Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources

Test for Unicode support in Web browsers

Arabic

U+0600 – U+06FF   (1536–1791)

The Arabic script is cursive, caseless, and written right-to-left. It is used for the following languages: Arabic, Farsi (the official language of Iran), Jawi, Kurdish, Pashto (the official language of Afghanistan), Sindhi and Urdu (the official language of Pakistan); it can also be used for Panjabi. Additional Arabic characters can be found in Arabic Extended-A, Arabic Supplement, Arabic Presentation Forms-A and Arabic Presentation Forms-B. You can find some real (non-Unicode) Arabic text to try at Arabic2000.Com and the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. You can see some Unicode Arabic in the FAQ for the Ayna Arabic search engine and the What is Unicode? in Arabic page. You can see some Unicode Farsi on the Trigeminal Software, Inc. (Farsi) page, the What is Unicode? in Persian page, the Sonnets of Hafez page and the BBC World Service page. You can see some Unicode Urdu on the Ghazal Web page.

Users of Internet Explorer 5 for Windows can choose to install Arabic Language Support, which allows you to view Arabic Web pages and adds Arabic support to some other applications. The latest versions of Microsoft’s core fonts for Windows (Arial, Courier New and Times New Roman) include Arabic characters.

Users of Macintosh computers running Mac OS 9 can install an Apple Language Kit that provides Arabic or Persian support in various applications.

Mac OS X incorporates support for Arabic from version 10.2 onwards. A Unicode Farsi keyboard layout for Mac OS X 10.2 can be downloaded from http://quinon.com/files/keylayouts/; it has been produced by Yusuke Kinoshita.

Arabic Web pages with UTF-8, Windows, ASMO 708 and DOS encodings are supported by Internet Explorer 5 (or higher) with Windows 95 (or higher). Arabic Web pages with UTF-8, ISO and Windows encodings are supported by the Opera Web browser version 7.2 (or higher). Arabic Web pages with UTF-8, ISO, Windows and MacArabic encodings are supported by the Mozilla Web browser. Arabic Web pages with UTF-8 and MacArabic encodings are supported by the iCab Web browser for Macintosh computers. Macintosh users with Netscape 4.5 or higher can purchase WinArabic to allow them to display Arabic Web pages with UTF-8 or Windows encodings.

The characters that appear in the “Character” columns of the following table depend on the browser that you are using, the fonts installed on your computer, and the browser options you have chosen that determine the fonts used to display particular character sets, encodings or languages.

You can find some or all of the characters in this range in the Windows Unicode fonts Aleem Urdu Unicode, Andalus, Arabic Transparent, Arabic Typesetting, Arial, Arial Unicode MS, Art (Bold Italic, Italic Outline), Cardo (numerals only), Chrysanthi Unicode, CN-Arial, CN-Times, Code2000, Courier New, DejaVu Sans, DejaVu Sans Condensed, DejaVu Sans Mono, Diwani (Bent, Letter, Outline Shaded, Simple Outline, Simple Outline2, Simple Striped), East Syriac Adiabene (few needed for Syriac), East Syriac Ctesiphon (few needed for Syriac), Estrangelo Antioch (few needed for Syriac), Estrangelo Edessa (few needed for Syriac), Estrangelo Midyat (few needed for Syriac), Estrangelo Nisibin (few needed for Syriac), Estrangelo Nisibin Outline (few needed for Syriac), Estrangelo Quenneshrin (few needed for Syriac), Estrangelo Talada (few needed for Syriac), Estrangelo TurAbdin (few needed for Syriac), Farsi Simple (Bold, Outline), Fixedsys Excelsior, Free Idg Serif, Free Serif, GlobalScience, Goher Urdu Unicode, Kurdish AllAlphabets, Lateef, Led Italic Font, Lucida Bright, Lucida Sans, Lucida Sans Typewriter, MD King KhammuRabi, Microsoft Sans Serif, Microsoft Uighur, MPH 2B Damase, Nafees Naskh, Nafees Nastaleeq, Nafees Pakistani Naskh, Nafees Riqa, Nafees Web Naskh, Nastaleeq Like, Nesf2, NSimSun-18030, Old Antic (Bold, Decorative, Outline, Outline Shaded), PakType Naqsh, PakType Tehreer, Pashto Kror Asiatype, _PDMS_Saleem_QuranFont, PT (Bold Arch, Bold Broken, Bold Dusky, Bold Heading, Bold Mirror, Bold Stars, Separated Balloon, Simple Bold Ruled), Roman Unicode (few), Samda, Scheherazade, Segoe UI, Serto Batnan (few needed for Syriac), Serto Jerusalem (few needed for Syriac), Serto Jerusalem Outline (few needed for Syriac), Serto Kharput (few needed for Syriac), Serto Malankara (few needed for Syriac), Serto Mardin (few needed for Syriac), Serto Urhoy (few needed for Syriac), Simple (Bold Jut Out, Indust Outline, Indust Shaded, Outline Pat), Simplified Arabic, Simplified Arabic Fixed, SimSun-18030, Sun-ExtA, Symbola, Tahoma, Times New Roman, TITUS Cyberbit Basic, Traditional Arabic, Unikurd Tishk, Unikurd Web, Urdu Naskh Asiatype, Urdu Naskh Unicode, Urdu Nastaliq Unicode, Zawgyi-One and zkurd ali.M; in the Macintosh OS 9 Unicode fonts AB AlBayan, AB Baghdad, AB Geeza, AB Kufi, AB Nadeem, DecoType Naskh, PS Amir, PS Asfahan, PS Kamran, PS Mashad, PS NadeemFarsi and Tahoma; in the Macintosh OS X Unicode fonts Al Bayan, Arial, Baghdad, DecoType Naskh, Geeza Pro, Geezah, KufiStandardGK, Nadeem, STFangsong, STHeiti, STKaiti, STSong and Times New Roman; and in the Unix Unicode fonts Arabic Newspaper and ClearlyU Arabic.

To see exactly which characters are included in a particular font, you can use a utility such as Andrew West’s BabelMap, or Apple’s TrueEdit.

If you are not familiar with the characters, you can check the characters displayed here with the graphical display at http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0600.pdf.

Copyright © 2002–2014 Alan Wood

The hexadecimal numbers and the character names in the above table are taken from the Unicode 7.0.0 Character Database, Copyright © 1991–2014 Unicode, Inc., as contained in UnicodeData.txt on the Unicode Web site (http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/) in October 2014.

Created 3rd February 1999 – Last updated 25th October 2014