circular-arabic

JavaScript and a web font to print Arabic script text in a circle.

This is somewhat more difficult than you'd expect... when printing Arabic characters one-by-one, you need appropriate text-shaping (selecting the right glyph) to show the letters joining to each other.

'Outie' style

Arabic printed with up = away from center.

Here's 'Australia' printed twice:

// the 'outie' style on a canvas element
var canv = document.getElementById('outie');
var ctx = canv.getContext('2d');

// set color and circle centroid
ctx.fillStyle = '#000';
ctx.translate(200, 200);

ArabicCircle(ctx, 'أستراليا أستراليا', 300, -1);

'Innie' style

Arabic printed with up = toward center

Here's 'Arabic alphabet' showing tashkil marks

// the 'innie' style on a canvas element
var innie = document.getElementById('innie');
var ctx2 = innie.getContext('2d');

// set color and circle centroid
ctx2.fillStyle = '#000';
ctx2.translate(200, 200);

ArabicCircle(ctx2, 'الأَبْجَدِيَّة العَرَبِيَّة‎‎', 300, 1);

Client and server recommendations

If you are running this in the browser, include an Arabic web font for consistently-sized letters and arcs:

@import url(//fonts.googleapis.com/earlyaccess/notonaskharabic.css);
canvas {
  font-family: 'Noto Naskh Arabic';
}

If you are running this on a NodeJS server, install the Noto Naskh Arabic font. You will also need to install node-canvas, which has installation instructions for several operating systems and cloud providers.

const Canvas = require('canvas');
var canv = new Canvas(400, 400);
var ctx = canv.getContext('2d');
...

License

Open source, MIT license