Keep in mind that the degree to which Microsoft supports Unicode is impacted both by the operating system AND the software.
NOTE: If you are using Google Docs, you can choose Source Sans Pro from the fonts menu and use it to type transliterated Arabic with diacritics.
Unzip it, then install the weights you want.
zip file with all the styles and weights. To download, visit /specimen/Source+Sans+Pro/, click "Download Family" in the upper right.
It is an open source typeface from Adobe, and is available for free from Google Fonts. It comes in 6 weights, from extra-light to Black, each with both regular and italic, and seems to have true small caps. Source Sans Pro is a free sans-serif with all the necessary diacritics.Like Gentium it has OpenType features such as proper small caps and ligatures. Small caps work properly, including letters with diacritics. It includes regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic weights. Charis is a free serif font with all the characters needed for transliteration of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, etc.Both include regular, italic, bold and bold italic weights. As of 2022 the latest version includes two complete families: Gentium Plus and Gentium Book Plus, which has a slightly heavier look. There are multiple versions, but Gentium Plus has the most characters and OpenType support for features like small caps that work properly with diacritics. Gentium is a free Unicode serif font with all the characters necessary for transliterating Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and other languages and scripts.We recommend using MEDOC when submitting to Mamlūk Studies Review. All weights (regular, italic, bold and bold italic) are included. The only differences between MEDOC and Jaghbub are the shapes of the ʿayn and hamzah characters. The MEDOC font is a modification of Jaghbub, which is Knut Vikør's legal modification of Times.TrueType fonts (.ttf) are not all Unicode compliant, but most of the ones available in current systems probably are, though they do not all have every character you need (this is also true OpenType fonts: not all of them have everything).
Fortunately, most new fonts are in the OpenType (.otf) format, which works in all current operating systems and most up-to-date software. To use Unicode, you will need a Unicode fonts. That means having a font that includes them and a way to type them. In most cases, use of Unicode will happen without any user effort until it comes to making sure you can enter the special characters and diacritics necessary for transliteration. In general, the older the operating system or software, the less it will support Unicode. There are several methods for entering Unicode in a document, some more complex than others. Even in software that supports Unicode, the degree of compliance can vary from one version to the next.
Users of recent versions of all major operating systems can use Unicode without much effort, and most, though not all, software supports it. (Click here for an indication of the scripts currently included, and here for those not yet included in the Unicode standard.) Not all fonts are Unicode fonts, and not all Unicode fonts have all possible characters. This caused problems when a user changed or did not have a document's original font, leading to incorrect glyphs (or nothing at all) appearing in the place of specific characters or symbols. In older font technologies, each font might designate glyphs with codes that meant something else (or nothing at all) in another font. Thus, no matter what Unicode font is being used, software will always use precisely the symbol being called for (assuming that the font has that glyph). Put simply, Unicode is a method of programming fonts that assigns a unique code to every symbol in every writing system. What is Unicode? The explanation at is a good place to begin.
While we have tested most of what follows, and we have no reason to think that any of it will cause problems, we assume no responsibility for any negative effects that might be caused to any software or hardware by downloading, installing or using any of it. The fonts and keyboard layouts listed below will help to solve these issues.
Even when a font does have everything needed, it is not always easy to enter the more obscure characters or to figure out how to get a dot under a T or Z. Unfortunately, not all fonts have all the required characters. Authors of Mamlūk Studies Review articles are asked to use Unicode fonts and proper diacritics.