Unified Arabic (UA) is basically a set of 30 letterforms, one for each letter of the Arabic alphabet, eliminating the variant forms that make reading and writing Arabic difficult for beginners. Initiated and designed by Nasri Khattar, Unified Arabic was not the first attempt to adapt Arabic to mechanical printing processes. As early as the 15th century, printers had attempted to simulate the cursive forms using movable type, but their efforts resulted in type cases of up to 500 characters per font, making manual and mechanical typesetting a laborious task at odds with the demands of unit-based mass production.
