The Central Kurdish variety Sorani is mainly written using an Arabic alphabet with 33 letters. Unlike the regular

Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and the ...

, which is an

abjad An abjad (, ar, أبجد; also abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with other alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels ...

, Kurdish Arabic is an alphabet in which

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...

s are mandatory.

Table of Unicode characters used in Kurdish-Arabic script

Non-letter characters in addition to

punctuation marks Punctuation (or sometimes interpunction) is the use of spacing, conventional signs (called punctuation marks), and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading of written text, whether read silently or aloud. An ...

and symbols are: * Tatweel (U+0640), used to stretch characters. * Zero width non-joiner (U+200C). Usage of the ZWNJ is non-standard but occurs a lot, most of the time this is due to poor conversions from non-Unicode to Unicode mapping in texts.

Kurdish Unicode fonts

Non-Unicode fonts

Ali fonts

''Alifonts'', widely used with

Windows 98 Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. The second operating system in the 9x line, it is the successor to Windows 95, and was released to ...

, enabled typing of Kurdish with Arabic or Farsi keyboard layouts. While it uses a non-standard mapping, typing Kurdish with Alifonts remains popular, as it does not require a specific Kurdish keyboard layout.

Ribaz fonts

Ribaz Font
99 non-Unicode fonts suited from Arabic fonts
file

Zanest fonts

Downloa
zanest fonts 1994

Dilan fonts

Converting to Unicode

* http://www.transliteration.kpr.eu/ku/en.html Kurdî Nûs], a versatile tool for converting to Unicode and Kurdish Latin by pellk Software Development Institute.
KurdITGroup's font converter
for converting non-Unicode fonts to Unicode. Beware: Some old converters convert Teh Marbuta (0629) to Heh + ZWNJ (0647 200C) instead of the correct Ae (06D5)! Most converters don't retain formatting through non-joiners and therefore give a slightly different, albeit more standard, rendering.

Web fonts

* ''Unikurd Web'': for 10, 11 and 12 pt * ''Tahoma'' & ''Tahoma Bold'' * ''Times New Roman'' * ''Arial''