How to display Arabic ligatures

Arabic ligatures like the one you linked are real Unicode characters, but most macOS text fields normalize them to standard letters. To display them, you must use a font that supports Arabic Presentation Forms (like Geeza Pro, Amiri, Noto Naskh), and use an app that allows advanced Arabic shaping (TextEdit Rich Text, Pages, Word, etc.). Browsers and search fields usually will not display them by design.

Gareth_Apple96 wrote:

do you know how to do it in Text Edit?

It is the same (at least in my Sequoia):

TextEdit > Format > Font > Show Fonts

Select Al Bayan (Geeza does not work)

Type characters and select them

Click on 3 dots at top left of Fonts panel and select Typography

Check box for Optional Ligatures

(What is your MacOS version? If older, some things might be different or not work right)

Gareth_Apple96 wrote:

Thanks Tom. DmI have made a Pages file now. How do you get that Typography window? Thanks again.

Type two characters and select them

Pages > Format > Font > Show Fonts

Select Al Bayan (Geeza does not work)

Click on 3 dots at top left of Fonts panel and select Typography

Check box for Optional Ligatures

(What is your MacOS version? If older, some things might be different or not work right)

To change the font and test for ligatures you need to have the two characters input separately instead of the unitary FC12. If I type th and m and try different fonts in Text Edit, there are some that produce the ligature, like Farisi and Mishafi, but al bayan and various others do not (see below). That's just the result of the font makers choices of supporting some ligatures and not others.

Can you explain what the end purpose of your project is? Those Arabic code points in the arabic presentation forms ranges are not really intended for use in normal unicode text -- they are in the standard to provide backward compatibility with some pre-unicode systems from the 30 years ago and earlier. Whether there is a single font that has typographic support for all the ligatures in those ranges I don't know, but Mishafi seems to have a lot of options in the pane in Sequoia. It's possible that Monterey from 4 years ago is more limited.

Gareth_Apple96 wrote:

So basically are you saying you can’t just copy and past the ligature from the webpage? You have just got to generate them within the text file by typing the individual letters in a font that supports the ligature?

It depends on how the web page has been done. If done using the standard 0600 range characters, copy/paste should be the same as typing in. But if it uses the FCxx range presentation forms, copy/paste probably won’t work (which is one reason they are in practice non-standard). If you have a url for the page I can have a look at how it is put together.

What book are you using? By chance I have Mastering Arabic on my iPad.

Gareth_Apple96 wrote:

The URL was in my previous post » https://symbl.cc/en/FC12/

If you want to avoid having to type in the individual characters using the normal Arabic input source, you can convert what you paste from that site using the app UnicodeChecker. Download and install that and then go to TextEdit > Services > Services Settings > Text and expand the item for Text and check the box for Convert to Unicode Normalization Form KD.

Then if you have copied the FCXX ligature in Text Edit, select it and go to Services and select the KD item. That should generate the individual characters on which you can test various fonts to see if they do what you want.

Below is an example of how these ligatures can be displayed. It requires a word processor and font that support special typographic features which can be switched on to generate the special ligature glyph from the normal arabic unicode characters in the U+0600 block.

Gareth_Apple96 wrote:

there are just a few that were not produced by Mishafi or any of the other fonts I tried. I have listed these combinations below.

Interesting, coverage is better than I expected. For the remaining ones, I think the only way is to find them on symbl.cc or a similar site (or use the Unicode Hex keyboard to type their codes) and see if Courier New or FSung-m will display them correctly when pasted.

Gareth_Apple96 wrote:

There were a few I missed actually. All of these are not generated by Mishafi.

Thanks, that's useful info! If you do wind up using the FSung-m font, I'd be interested in knowing if it does cover all the presentation forms you are interested in. I think it may be the only font that provides full coverage of that unicode range.

PS FSung-m may have more ligatures than Courier New, but it does not come with MacOS. You can get it at

https://github.com/lxs602/FSung-font

Feel free to just copy/paste problematic text here and I or someone can probably help with any issues.