Technical • 6 min read
Font licensing is a subject many designers learn the hard way, when they receive a licensing violation notice after using a commercially restricted font in a client project. For Urdu and Arabic fonts specifically, the landscape is somewhat different from Latin fonts — a larger proportion of high-quality options are genuinely free for commercial use, but the conditions vary and are worth understanding before using any font in production.
The SIL Open Font License is the most widely used open-source license for fonts, and most high-quality free Urdu fonts, including the four used in UrduCraft's tools (Noto Nastaliq Urdu, Noto Naskh Arabic, Scheherazade New, and Amiri), are distributed under it. The OFL broadly permits using the font in any project, including commercial ones, modifying the font for internal use, and bundling the font with software or documents. The key restrictions are that you cannot sell the font by itself, and modified versions must be released under the OFL with a different name so they can't be confused with the original.
A font labeled "free for commercial use" means you can use it in a logo, a client deliverable, a published book, packaging, a website, or an app, without paying a license fee. It does not mean you can sell the font file itself or claim to own the typeface design. For most practical design and development work, OFL fonts cover every common use case, and checking the OFL status of a font before using it commercially takes about thirty seconds but removes significant legal risk.
All fonts available through Google Fonts are licensed under OFL or Apache 2.0, both of which permit commercial use. Since the four fonts powering our tools are all served via Google Fonts, any design using these fonts in a personal or commercial project is on solid licensing ground. For discovering additional Urdu-compatible fonts beyond our four, the Google Fonts catalog filtered to Arabic script is the most reliable starting point for free, commercial-use options.
Commercial (paid) Urdu fonts exist, particularly for specialized publishing, newspapers, and high-end editorial typesetting where the quality requirements or aesthetic specificity go beyond what free fonts provide. Pakistani font foundries and some international type foundries sell Nastaliq and Naskh fonts with varying license structures, some per-device, some per-project, some subscription-based. Before purchasing, check specifically whether the license covers web embedding (if you're using it in a website font stack), app embedding, and unlimited print quantities, since some commercial font licenses restrict specific use cases even within paid tiers.
Every font distributed as a file should include a license file in the same folder, typically named LICENSE.txt or OFL.txt. If no license file is present, that's a red flag — assume the font is not free to use commercially until you can confirm otherwise. Taking two minutes to read the license file before using a font in a client project is always faster than dealing with a license dispute afterward.
Before using any Urdu or Arabic font in a commercial project, it's worth running through a short verification: Is the font available from the original foundry or a trusted distributor, or downloaded from an unofficial third-party site? Does the license text explicitly permit commercial use, or does it only allow personal use? If you're embedding the font in a website, does the license cover web embedding specifically (some fonts are licensed for desktop but not web use)? Are there any attribution requirements — some OFL fonts require that you include the font's copyright notice in your project's documentation? Five minutes checking these questions before starting a project is considerably easier than discovering a licensing issue after delivery.
For designers and developers who want a reliable, clearly-licensed starting point, the Urdu and Arabic fonts available through Google Fonts, including Noto Nastaliq Urdu, Noto Naskh Arabic, Amiri, and Scheherazade New, are all distributed under the SIL OFL and have had their licensing status publicly reviewed. They also come with the practical advantage of being hostable via the Google Fonts API at no cost, with Google handling the content delivery network, caching, and browser compatibility. This makes them an easy default for web projects where font licensing and performance both matter. Our guide to the best free Urdu fonts covers these options in more detail with practical notes on which works best for which context.