KacstOne is a simplified Arabic font originally released by KACST under GPL and then re-packaged by Arabeyes and released as part of our Khotot project. During my endless quest for a good libre Arabic font for use on screen (GUI mainly), I started working on KacstOne in late 2009 heavily cleaning it up and experimenting with an idea of optimising the outlines for a specific point size and screen resolution (namely 10pt as it the common font size for most UI and 100dpi which was chosen arbitrary and was a bad choice since it is not the default resolution of any UI). The experiment was successful in my opinion but I did not work on the font any further (basically I was not very fond of individual letter forms and decided to work on a new font from scratch using the new experience, but that never happened). The font is one weight, there is no bold nor slanted variants.

Recently I was asked by an Uyghur user to include a few missing characters required for Uyghur since non of the fonts installed by default in Ubuntu supports Uyghur (KacstOne is installed by default in Ubuntu, though not set as default Arabic font). It didn’t seem to much work, so I did it and now KacstOne 4.0 is now available for download. The tireless Ahmad Almahmoudy quickly packaged it for Ubuntu and a freeze exception was accepted so the font should be available in Ubuntu SomeWeirdAnimalName 11.04.