Good questions. I think I can help.
Bitstream Cyberbit is a free unicode truetype font that supports Arabic.
Download it, extract it, and put it in /usr/local/share/fonts. Issue the following commands:
Code:
cd /usr/local/share/fonts
/usr/X11R6/bin/mkfontdir .
/usr/X11R6/bin/mkfontscale .
This will create two files named
fonts.dir and
fonts.scale. Have a look at them. They should contain entries for all the fonts in that directory.
Edit xorg.conf and added
FontPath "/usr/local/share/fonts" to the appropriate section. It should be pretty obvious where this goes.
Now copy /etc/fonts/fonts.conf to /etc/fonts/local.conf. Then edit local.conf and delete everything between the opening and closing "fontconfig" tags. In that space add one line:
<dir>/usr/local/share/fonts/</dir>.
Then issue the following command:
Now restart X. If you don't see Arabic characters in Firefox by this point, make a follow-up post.