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As an example of the font rendering actual Arabic text, here's the word "shanasheel", which is a term for an enclosed balcony (also called a mashrabiya; the word is familiar to me because it's the name of a restaurant near me). I've rendered it using my own font as well as my browser (Google Translate's built-in multilingual keyboards are very handy here), and you can see just how wide the pixels make things.
@bj I guess pixel art doesn't do cursive very well.
...Surely there have been Arabic video games, or Arabic translations of Japanese or English ones, though. Were there any Arabic fonts for tile-based consoles? What did those look like, I wonder?
-F
@Felthry That's a good enough question that I went looking, and the MSX had an Arabic font that looks like it has the same width issues as mine does, so I think I'm in good company as far as best effort attempts go.
(Image source: https://www.msx.org/wiki/images/3/39/Arabic2h.png)
@bj Yeah, the bottom is the bit that looks more like what you did, and more like how a font would work on a tile-based system.
Cursive just doesn't work right with fixed-width fonts.
-F
@Felthry Yeah, that's almost definitely graphics. What I'm comparing to is the text in the middle. The name "Alalamiah" matches my own understanding of how Arabic letters work, and then the bottom text I can only guess is a copyright notice.