The best Arabic fonts for a Shopify store (and what breaks them)
Tarz guides · Updated August 2026
Start with four families: Cairo and Tajawal for versatile everyday text, Noto Kufi Arabic for headlines and brand marks, and IBM Plex Sans Arabic for long-form reading. All four are free, released under the SIL Open Font License, and hold up at storefront sizes — provided your theme does not apply Latin typography habits to them.
Why does Arabic type break on Latin-first themes?
Arabic is a connected script. Letters inside a word join, and each letter changes shape depending on its neighbours. A theme designed for Latin text carries no awareness of this, and three of its most ordinary habits do real damage:
- Letter-spacing. Latin themes add tracking to headings, buttons and labels as a styling choice. Applied to Arabic, tracking pushes joined letters apart and severs the connections — the word is shredded into disconnected fragments. Correct Arabic typography sets letter-spacing to exactly zero, everywhere Arabic renders.
- Faux italics. Arabic has no italic tradition, and most Arabic families ship no italic style. When a stylesheet requests one anyway, the browser fakes it by slanting the upright letterforms, which deforms the script. Emphasis in Arabic is carried by weight or colour, never by slant.
- Base size and line-height tuned for Latin. At the same nominal size, Arabic tends to read smaller than Latin, and it needs more vertical room — ascenders, descenders and diacritics sit further from the baseline. A theme tuned to Latin proportions sets Arabic body text too small and too tight, and dots start colliding with the line above.
None of these are font problems. The finest Arabic family on the market will render badly under a stylesheet that treats it as Latin — which is why choosing a font is the second decision, and choosing a theme that respects the script is the first. The full list of what to verify is in the Shopify RTL checklist.
Body faces and display faces are different jobs
A display face is drawn to perform at large sizes: a headline, a hero banner, a logo lockup. A body face is drawn to disappear at small sizes — open counters, even rhythm, letterforms that stay distinct at the size of a product description on a phone.
The most common typography mistake on Arabic storefronts is picking one striking decorative family and applying it to the entire store. The homepage looks distinctive; the product descriptions, size charts and checkout-adjacent text become genuinely hard to read. Choose your body face first, for readability, and your display face second, for character. They are separate settings in any competent theme.
Which four Arabic fonts should you start with?
These are the four featured families in Tarz's library, and between them they cover almost every Arabic storefront. Each specimen below is the live font, not an image.
Cairo
طراز A contemporary Arabic sans with Kufi roots, and the closest thing Arabic web typography has to a safe default. It holds its shape at heading sizes and stays readable in paragraphs, so it is the right answer when you want one family to do both jobs. If you are unsure where to begin, begin here.
Tajawal
طراز A clean geometric sans with low contrast and open forms — a modern retail voice. It earns its keep in interface text: product cards, navigation, prices, filters, the places a shopper reads in half-second glances. It stays comfortable in longer passages too, which few faces this geometric manage.
Noto Kufi Arabic
طراز A geometric Kufi display face, built for headlines and brand marks. At large sizes it is confident and architectural; at paragraph sizes it tires the eye quickly. Keep it for headings and let a body face do the reading — used with that discipline, it gives a store an unmistakable voice.
IBM Plex Sans Arabic
طراز A humanist body face with excellent long-form legibility, drawn as part of IBM's Plex superfamily. That superfamily matters for a bilingual store: it has a Latin sibling built to the same logic, so mixed Arabic–English text — product titles, brand names, size charts — sits together instead of clashing.
| Family | Classification | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Cairo | Contemporary sans, Kufi roots | Headings and body — the versatile default |
| Tajawal | Geometric sans, low contrast | Interface text, product cards, longer passages |
| Noto Kufi Arabic | Geometric Kufi display | Headlines and brand marks, never paragraphs |
| IBM Plex Sans Arabic | Humanist sans | Long-form body text; bilingual Arabic–English stores |
Does the licence matter?
More than most merchants expect. All four families are released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 — free for commercial use, and permitted to be self-hosted and bundled inside a product. That word "bundled" is the important one: a paid theme redistributes its font files to every store that installs it, which is only lawful when each family's licence allows exactly that. Every one of the 53 families in Tarz's library has had its licence audited for this, and IBM Plex Sans Arabic ships as IBM's own official build files.
If you upload fonts to your store yourself, apply the same care: not every Arabic font passed around the web is actually licensed for commercial embedding. Check before it goes anywhere near your storefront.
Should you self-host Arabic web fonts?
Yes. Self-hosted fonts load from your own store, so there is no third-party request to slow the page down, no external dependency to fail, and no data flowing to a font CDN. Shopify's built-in font picker is thin on Arabic, which is why a serious Arabic theme carries its own library.
The performance rule that matters more than hosting, though, is this: only the families you actually use should ever load. Arabic font files are not small — a connected script needs contextual forms for every letter — and a theme that ships its whole library to the browser pays for that on every page view. A well-built theme emits the two or three families you selected and nothing else.
How Tarz handles Arabic fonts
Tarz ships a library of 53 Arabic font families — every free Arabic family in the Google Fonts catalogue, each one licence-audited and self-hosted inside the theme. The library is tiered: 4 featured families, 22 graded body-safe, and 27 marked display-only. The body-font picker lists body-safe families only, so the theme cannot suggest an unreadable body face — the decorative Kufi that would ruin your product descriptions is simply not on that menu.
Only the families you select are emitted; the rest never reach a shopper's browser. And the typography rules above are enforced by the theme itself: letter-spacing locked to zero in Arabic contexts, no faux italics anywhere, and base size and line-height compensated for Arabic script.
The default pairing on the Tarz preset is Noto Kufi Arabic for headings with IBM Plex Sans Arabic for body text. Nabd, the second preset — it ships to every buyer as a free theme update after launch — pairs Cairo with Tajawal. Both pairings are defaults, not restrictions: every family in the library is selectable. Setup is covered in the getting-started documentation, and the full build is itemised in the technical specifications.
Tarz is in final development and will go through Shopify's theme review before listing. The planned launch price is $300, one time. We are not publishing a date we cannot hold — the waitlist gets one email on the day it goes live.