Printing Arabic receipts on a thermal printer

Arabic on a receipt is where many point-of-sale systems quietly fail. The letters print unconnected, the line reads left to right, or the amounts land on the wrong side. The cause is the printer: ESC/POS code pages carry Arabic letters, but not the shaping, the joining or the bidirectional layout that make them text.

Rasters, not code pages

CertiPOS composes the receipt on the register with a real Arabic font, shapes and lays out every line, and sends the result to the printer as a bitmap. Any ESC/POS printer that prints a logo prints an Arabic receipt, with no firmware, font or code page to configure.

What a bilingual receipt needs

• Right-to-left lines for Arabic text and left-to-right islands for numbers, codes, barcodes and amounts, so a total reads the same in both languages.
• A companion font: IBM Plex Sans Arabic was drawn to match IBM Plex Sans, with the same stroke contrast and numeral widths, so a bilingual receipt looks like one document.
• Arabic rendered about eight per cent larger than the Latin at the same nominal size, and never letter-spaced.
• The mark as a one-colour bitmap at the printer’s width, 384 or 576 dots, never scaled by the printer.

The same rule everywhere

The register, the portal, the e-receipt and the guest pages follow the same rule: Arabic is a first-class script, numerals stay Latin in both directions, and the wordmark is never translated. The fonts ship inside the applications so a receipt prints the same with the internet down.