Arabic line height excessive

[jojo4u]

Noto Kufi Arabic is really tall: It has a line height of 1.9x em. This is compared to 1.36 em of Noto Sans UI and Noto Naskh Arabic UI - sadly there is no UI variant of Kufi. Maybe reconsider decision to use Kufi instead of Naskh (style.mss: Noto Kufi Arabic is the one that is most similiar to a Sans style)

Casablanca - first Kufi then Naskh (the middle line is the local Shilha)

Also a road shield from #2478 in Tunisia (link)

Line heights here: https://gist.github.com/jojo4u/0b9284abc03278559a5ccd8dc49d4c0e (divide text height by EM size).

[sommerluk]

Yes, this seems to be a good idea.

The good thing about Kufi was that it seemed to be more legible at the same font size. However, the high line spacing seems to be a fixed design property of the arabic script, so that’s the price we have to pay when using Kufi.

Apart from the line spacing, there might be another argument for Nashk: Following Googles Noto page, it covers more languages and regions, so I assume it has some more glyphs than Kufi. Furthermore, it has an UI version.

BTW: It seems that in the Noto alpha version, both Kufi Arabic and Nashk Arabic are no longer available, but there is a Sans Arabic (also UI version available).

[jojo4u]

The alpha "Noto Sans Arabic UI" is between Kufi and Naskh in style. So this might be an alternative in the future.