The UAE Dirham Symbol: How to Actually Type and Use It

By Tamer Azab · dirhamfont.com

The UAE Dirham has an official symbol now — a distinct written mark meant to do for AED what $ does for the dollar or € does for the euro. It shows up in press releases, bank branding, and design mockups. What it doesn't show up in is your keyboard.

There's no dedicated key for it, it isn't part of the standard Latin keyboard layout, and unless a designer manually places it as a graphic, most people writing prices in AED are stuck typing "AED" or "Dhs" the old way. That gap is what this project fixes.

The problem with "just use the symbol"

Search around and you'll mostly find the Dirham symbol as a picture — an SVG on a design blog, a logo file, a screenshot in a news article. Fine for a poster, useless for a price tag, an invoice template, or a line of body copy. You can't select it, resize it with your text, recolor it with your CSS, or paste it into a spreadsheet cell. It's a shape, not a character.

Making it an actual font

A font is the right fix, because a font glyph behaves like text: it flows with your paragraph, resizes with your font-size, inherits your color, and gets copy-pasted like anything else. The question is which key should produce it.

The obvious answer is D — it's the first letter of "Dirham," it's mnemonic, and it means you don't need a special keyboard layout or a unicode picker to reach for it. So that's what this font does: install it, select it, press D or d, and you get the symbol instead of the letter. Every other key on the keyboard still behaves normally — this only touches D and d, and only when that specific font is applied.

For workflows that prefer raw unicode over font substitution, the glyph is also mapped to the Private Use Area codepoint U+E000, which is the convention several other Dirham-symbol tools have used.

Installing it

macOS: download the font, double-click the .otf file, click Install Font in Font Book.

Windows: right-click the .ttf file, choose Install.

Web: drop the .woff2/.woff files in and declare it with @font-face:

@font-face {
  font-family: "Dirham";
  src: url("Dirham-Regular.woff2") format("woff2"),
       url("Dirham-Regular.woff") format("woff");
}

.price::before {
  font-family: "Dirham";
  content: "D";
}

One caveat worth being upfront about

Because this works by remapping a letter inside a specific font file, it only produces the symbol where you can select that font — a text editor, a design tool, a web page. It isn't a system-wide keyboard remap that overrides D in every app regardless of typeface; macOS and Windows don't expose that kind of global override to a font file. In practice, that's rarely a limitation: anywhere you're setting prices in AED, you're already choosing a font.

Credit

The Dirham symbol is the official currency mark of the United Arab Emirates. This font build, the D/d key mapping and the packaging are by Tamer Azab.