This is the README for alkalami version 1.000 (2017-05-30). Alkalami is designed for Arabic-based writing systems in the Kano region of Nigeria and Niger. Alkalami (pronounced al-KA-la-mi) is the local word for the Arabic "qalam", a type of sharpened stick used for writing on wooden boards in the Kano region of Nigeria and in Niger, and what gives the style its distinct appearance. The baseline stroke is very thick and solid. The ascenders and other vertical strokes including the teeth are very narrow when compared to the baseline. A generous line height is necessary to allow for deep swashes and descenders, and the overall look of the page is a very black, solid rectangle. Diacritics are much smaller in scale, with very little distance from the main letters. 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 OFL.txt for details of the SIL Open Font License. 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. Encoding: The fonts are encoded according to Unicode, so your application must support Unicode text in order to access letters. 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. For more information see the Alkalami website: http://software.sil.org/alkalami/ This CTAN package was packaged by Bob Tennent rdt(at)cs.queensu.ca.