My name is Khaled Hosny (خالد حسني). I’m a type designer, and software developer specializing in fonts, text layout, and Arabic support. I’m also an aspiring calligrapher, amateur painter, and avid book reader. I’m currently based in Cairo, Egypt.
I got my first computer in 2002, with little prior experience. One thing led to another and I became a Linux user. Shortly after, I learnt about Arabeyes, a project dedicated to improving the support for Arabic language in Free Software. I joined and started contributing by first translating software and documentation, and later maintaining a collection of Arabic fonts.
I have been contributing to and maintaining Free Software projects since 2005. I have no formal education in design or programming. I learned everything I know through self-study and practice, and if it wasn’t for the Free Software community, I’d not have had access to the software resources to study and learn from.
I have contributed to many Free Software projects over the years. My contributions mostly revolve around improving the support for Arabic language and script, and text layout and font rendering in general. Projects I contributed to include Arabeyes, Gnome, GTK, Pango, Firefox, XeTeX, LuaTeX, FontForge, Emacs, Scribus, and LibreOffice. I still actively contribute to many projects like HarfBuzz, Raqm, and FontTools.
I have always had a passion for Arabic calligraphy, and I tried to self-learn calligraphy but never managed to be good at it on my own. When I got introduced to computers, and later to type design, I thought if I couldn’t master calligraphy myself, perhaps I can get the computer to do it for me. Anyone experienced in calligraphy or type design can tell how naïve that idea was. While calligraphy and typography are closely related, they have very different requirements, strengths, and constraints. I didn’t know better at the time.
I started working on my first typeface, Amiri, in 2008. It remains my most famous work, with its own Wikipedia Page and all. I have since designed many other typefaces, like Mada, Reem Kufi, Rana Kufi, Qahiri, and Raqq. I have a few more unpublished typefaces that I hope to complete and publish one day. I started a type foundry, Alif Type, where I publish my typefaces, and many of them are also available on Google Fonts. I also do font engineering for other type foundries and designers.
I have a weak spot for mathematical typesetting, even though I don’t understand much of mathematical notation, since I studied mathematics in Arabic notation, and much of which I have since forgotten. I have worked on engineering a few math typefaces over the years, like XITS Math, Lucida Math, Libertinus Math, Nagwa TK Math, IBM Plex Math, and Noto Sans Math. I even developed a GlyphsApp plugin for developing math typefaces.
It wasn’t until 2019 that I started to learn calligraphy the proper way at the hands of a master calligrapher. I started with various Kufic styles that are drawn with a pencil and a ruler at Al Qalam. Later I moved to calligraphy styles that are written with a reed pen, starting with Diwani followed by Naskh at Al Azhar.
I graduated from medical school in 2010. I originally planned to practice surgery, viewing type design and software development as mere hobbies at the time. However, a physical condition led me to reconsider surgery, and I explored radiology instead. It didn’t work out for me, and in 2014 when I had to choose between medicine and another career, I quit medicine for good.
In 2013 I started working at Translate House as a Software Developer and Localization Engineer. Working on projects like Pootle, and Translate Toolkit, among other things.
In 2014 I started working at Hindawi Publishing Corporation as a senior Document Engineer, where I worked with TeX, XML, PDF and other typesetting and scientific publishing technologies.
In 2015 I moved to Muscat, Oman, for 6 months to work for the Information Technology Authority as a Consultant, mentoring a group of fresh graduates on contributing to Free Software projects, where we wrote Raqm, and contributed Arabic and advanced text layout support to Scribus, among other things.
Between 2017 and 2019 I worked at Motoon as a localization specialist, and various other roles (at two occasions, I taught 8-14 year olds programming using Scratch and Python).
In 2023, I worked for The Document Foundation as a software developer, to work mainly on LibreOffice text layout and right-to-left support.
I don’t currently have a full-time job, but I’m working as a freelance type designer, font engineer, as well as a software developer in areas related to fonts and text layout.
Finally, I’m not a very social person, and I’m usually shy when meeting new people. If you see me around, feel free to say hi!
Some of my calligraphy art work.
