Arabic font in browsers is ugly and hard to read

If you are seeing nastalique when you type arabic, you need to go to settings / general / language & region and make sure that arabic is higher on the list than urdu.

In Firefox you should be able to use whatever font you want by going to Preferences > Language & Appearance > Fonts > Advanced

midueshen wrote:

This issue is only present in websites that do not provid their own fonts and depend on the system's. This is why I posted the issue here rather than in Firefox forum or something, because it is not even related to Firefox, since other browsers, specifically Chrome and Safari have the same issue.

But the system has several hundred fonts to choose from. It is the responsibility of web sites to choose which fonts they use. If you don't like the font that a web site is using, you will have to contact them and ask for a change. It's a website problem, not a system problem. That's why you see it in all web browsers but not in native apps. The native apps are using a different font.

You pointed out how the embedded links are using a different font. That's a good example. If you inspect Twitter's internal HTML code, you can see what fonts they are using for the text of a Tweet:

TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif

But for a link or hashtag, these are their font selections:

Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif;

That's an obvious difference. However, there are additional details. The operating system does ultimately decide what font to use regardless of those specified settings. Arabic is a good example. The operating system isn't going to use a font that can't represent those Arabic characters. There is an internal font "cascade list" that is used to pick a font that can best represent the text being rendered. There may also be additional heuristics that go into how fonts are chosen. I'm not an expert on font usage. But sadly, I often seem to know more about them than people who write major apps. 😄

But ultimately, anyone displaying pre-styled text has a responsibility to choose how that text is rendered. As you can see from the hashtag example, there are always different options to choose from. Apple isn't going to make stylistic choices (well, sometimes they do, but it's a long story). It is really up to the developers of the web sites themselves to decide how they want the text to look.

Web sites are free to use their own fonts. They can even use web fonts that you don't have installed on your computer.

An Apple app like Notes will use Apple's system fonts.

Sadly, it looks like the guilty party in this case is Elon Musk. Good luck getting that one fixed.

midueshen wrote:

I will find a hack to remove that ugly font from my system.

Here is something from another forum where people have discussed this

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/446231/change-system-wide-default-font-for-a-particular-language

UrduDaan wrote:

I completely agree that Apple messed up the font. I think they were trying to make it look like Nastaleeq font and I was excited to see that for Urdu language. Now that I am learning Arabic, I am really frustrated that it uses the same font and it is IMPOSSIBLE to write Arabic correctly with this font. Apple’s attitude towards this seems like: ‘it’s all the same jibbrish! What is the difference. Just scribble away in whatever we have granted and thank your stars’

Tell Apple:

Product Feedback - Apple

I don't know that it can be fixed but you can at least send Apple feedback about the issue.

Feedback - macOS - Apple

midueshen wrote:

Chrome and Safari have the same issue.

By all means let the people who make Chrome know they should provide users the same font choices that Firefox does. For Safari you can do this at

http://www.apple.com/feedback

I completely agree that Apple messed up the iMessage font. I think they were trying to make it look like Nastaleeq font and I was excited to see that for Urdu language. Now that I am learning Arabic, I am really frustrated that it uses the same font and it is IMPOSSIBLE to write Arabic correctly with this font. Apple’s attitude towards this seems like: ‘it’s all the same jibbrish! What is the difference. Just scribble away in whatever we have granted and thank your stars’