README
Alkalami
========================

Thank you for your interest in the Alkalami font.
We hope you find it useful!

Alkalami supports a subset of the Unicode 9.0 Arabic character 
repertoire. It only includes characters known to be used in
Modern Standard Arabic and characters known to be necessary 
in a few West African languages.
 
Font smarts are implemented using the OpenType technology. 
A number of glyph variations are accessible through Stylistic
Sets available via the OpenType technology. 

Alkalami is released under the SIL Open Font License.
Alkalami is a trademark of SIL International.
	
See the OFL and OFL-FAQ for details of the SIL Open Font License.
See the FONTLOG for information on this and previous releases.

For further information about this font, including Unicode ranges
supported, OpenType font features and how to use them, 
and licensing, please see the documentation on the website 
(http://software.sil.org/alkalami/) or in the documentation 
subfolder of this font package.

TIPS
====

As this font is distributed at no cost, we are unable to provide a 
commercial level of personal technical support. The font has, however, 
been through some testing on various platforms to be sure it works in most
situations. In particular, it has been tested and shown to work on Windows 7 
and Windows 8. 

If you do find a problem, please do report it through 
http://software.sil.org/alkalami/support/. We can't guarantee any direct response, but 
will try to fix reported bugs in future versions. 

Many problems can be solved, or at least explained, through an understanding
of the encoding and use of the fonts. Here are some basic hints:

Encoding: 
The fonts are encoded according to Unicode, so your application must support
Unicode text in order to access letters. Most Windows applications provide 
basic Unicode support. For Arabic text, your application must be able to
handle Right to Left text as well as the initial, medial, final forms of each
Arabic letter. You will also need some way of entering Unicode text into your 
document.

Keyboarding:
This font does not include any keyboarding helps or utilities. You may use the
built-in keyboards of the operating system. You may also need to install an
appropriate keyboard and input method for the characters of the language you
wish to use. If you want to enter characters that are not supported by any
system keyboard, the Keyman program (www.keyman.com) can be helpful
on Windows systems. Also available for Windows is MSKLC 
(http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/msklc.mspx). 
For other platforms, KMFL (http://kmfl.sourceforge.net/), 
XKB (http://www.x.org/wiki/XKB) or Ukelele (http://scripts.sil.org/ukelele) 
can be helpful.

If you want to enter characters that are not supported by any system
keyboard, and to access the full Unicode range, you might try charmap.exe
on Windows or, on Ubuntu or similar software,  gucharmap or kcharselect.

Another method of entering some symbols is provided by a few applications such
as Adobe InDesign or LibreOffice.org. They can display a glyph palette or input
dialog that shows all the glyphs (symbols) in a font and allow you to enter
them by clicking on the glyph you want.

Rendering:
This font is designed to work with the OpenType technology. To take advantage 
of the advanced typographic capabilities of this font, you must be using 
applications that provide an adequate level of support for OpenType. 


CONTACT
========
For more information see the Alkalami website:
http://software.sil.org/alkalami/

