“Calligraphy isn’t decoration in Arabic culture,” notes Youssef Karam, a type designer based in Cairo who consulted on the project. “It’s architecture. The baseline is the ground. The ascenders (alif, lam) are pillars. The descenders (waw, ra) are roots. Arabic-Text.com understands that. It doesn’t just display letters; it respects their gravity.”
By Nora Al-Mansouri
That, says Haddad, is the mission statement. Not to reinvent Arabic, but to give it back its clarity—one correctly rendered alif at a time. [Arabic-Text.com] – Clean. Connected. Calligraphic.
Arabic-Text.com began as a simple web form. Paste garbled text in, get clean Unicode out. But users quickly demanded more. Students wanted to strip tashkeel for readability. Poets wanted to add it back for precision. Transliterators needed to convert between Arabic script and Latin-based Arabizi (e.g., "7abiby" for "حبيبي"). Editors needed to reverse strings that had been mangled by left-to-right software.
“Thank you,” he wrote, “for making my language legible again.”
Moreover, monetization is delicate. “We will never paywall the core text tools,” Haddad insists. “Arabic belongs to everyone. We make money from API calls, font licensing, and enterprise support. The web-based converter is a public good.”
The problem is .
“You open the same news article on three different phones,” says Leila Haddad, the 34-year-old founder of , “and the letters break, the kashida (tatweel) vanishes, and the hamza floats in the wrong place. We’ve accepted a broken digital mirror for too long.”