Harmattan, named after the trade winds that blow during the winter in West Africa, is designed in a Warsh style to suit the needs of languages using the Arabic script in West Africa. The font does not cover the full Unicode Arabic repertoire. It only supports characters known to be used by languages in West Africa.

This font provides a simplified rendering of Arabic script, using basic connecting glyphs but not including a wide variety of additional ligatures or contextual alternates (only the required lam-alef ligatures.) This simplified style is often preferred for clarity, especially in non-Arabic languages, but may be considered unattractive in more traditional and literate communities.

Harmattan supports a subset of the Unicode 7.0 Arabic character repertoire. It does not include the Arabic Presentation Forms blocks, which are not recommended for normal use. It also does not include some of characters in the "Arabic", "Arabic Supplement", and "Arabic Extended-A" blocks when they are known to be unnecessary in West African languages.

Bob Hallissy does Graphite, OpenType, and TypeTuner code, and build support. Becca Hirsbrunner is the Lead Designer. George W. Nuss is the Original Designer. Iska Routamaa is a Contributing Designer. The Harmattan project is maintained by SIL International. Harmattan is released under the SIL Open Font License. Harmattan is a trademark of SIL International.

For further information about this font, including Unicode ranges supported, Graphite and OpenType font features and how to use them, and licensing, please see the documentation on the website scripts.sil.org/Harmattan