خَطّ — Khatt

Render Arabic text as ASCII/Unicode-block art — the Arabic FIGlet that FIGlet can't be.

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(that's «خط» — "khatt", meaning line/script/calligraphy — Amiri font, braille style)

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       :@.           =:       *+--  =@   *#                       =@
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  .@=        :-                                             :- -.
+*%+         -*                                             =+ *:

(«ايه الأخبار» — "What's the news?" — Cairo font, ascii style)

Why FIGlet can't do this

FIGlet fonts map one character to one fixed glyph. Arabic doesn't work that way:

• Every letter has up to four positional forms (isolated / initial / medial / final).
• Some letter pairs form mandatory ligatures — ل + ا must become لا.
• The script is cursive: letters connect, and the connections carry the word's shape.
• Text runs right-to-left, and real text mixes RTL words with LTR numbers and names.

Khatt sidesteps glyph tables entirely with a rasterize-then-map pipeline:

text ──► HarfBuzz shaping ──► FreeType rasterization ──► density mapping ──► art
         (positional forms,    (real Arabic fonts,        (blocks / ascii /
          ligatures, bidi)      hi-res grayscale)          braille ramps)

The result is genuine calligraphic letterforms — from real fonts — approximated in terminal characters.

Install

pip install khatt        # or: uv add khatt

From source:

git clone https://github.com/DrEssam97/khatt.git && cd khatt
uv sync

Quickstart

Python API

import khatt

print(khatt.render("مرحبا"))                          # blocks style, 80 columns
print(khatt.render("خط", style="braille", width=60))  # high effective resolution
print(khatt.render("القاهرة", font="cairo", style="ascii", threshold=0.4))

khatt.list_fonts()   # ['amiri', 'cairo', 'noto-naskh', 'rubik']
khatt.list_styles()  # ['ascii', 'blocks', 'braille']

CLI

khatt "مرحبا"                          # render to the terminal
khatt "خط" --style braille --width 60
khatt "القاهرة" -f cairo -s ascii -t 0.4
echo "سلام" | khatt                    # stdin
khatt "خط" --output art.txt            # save the art
khatt "خط" --output khatt.png          # save the rendered text as an image
khatt --list-fonts
khatt --list-styles

Arabic diacritics (tashkeel) are stripped by default — they're illegible at character-grid resolution. Pass --keep-tashkeel (API: keep_tashkeel=True) to render them.

Gradio app

uv sync --extra app
uv run python app.py

Bundled fonts and styles

All fonts are licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, preserved verbatim in khatt/fonts/LICENSES/.

Deploy the app to a Hugging Face Space

app.py follows the Spaces convention (single file at the repo root), so the whole repository deploys unchanged with one command:

uv run --extra app gradio deploy

This prompts for a Space name on first run (it uses your huggingface-cli login credentials) and pushes the repo as a Gradio-SDK Space. Alternatively, create a Gradio Space on huggingface.co and git push this repository to it — app.py is picked up automatically and dependencies install via requirements.txt (which just points at pyproject.toml).

Development

uv sync --all-extras
uv run pre-commit install

The gate that must be green before every merge:

uv run ruff check . && uv run ruff format --check . && uv run mypy khatt && uv run pytest

Rendering changed intentionally? Regenerate the golden snapshots and commit the diff:

uv run pytest --update-golden

See CONTRIBUTING.md, PLAN.md and ROADMAP.md.

License

MIT for the code — see LICENSE. Bundled fonts are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 — see khatt/fonts/LICENSES/.