That iMessage rendering looks correct, just typeset differently.

Thank you for sharing! I wonder what distinguishes e.g. Omnibox/iMessage from TextEdit/Chrome textareas (especially since iMessage's entry box can be made multiline) to cause the divergent rendering!

it really is the same four words written in a different calligraphy and arranged in a different way (more horizontally). arabic calligraphy can take liberties with orientation of text and even arrangement of letters. the name of the game is make deciphering it a puzzle, but easy enough for the reader to have fun and not get bored.

The Super-R run-command dialog on Windows, and Notepad make it look crazy

In your iMessage screenshot, this character is being rendered in Noto Nastaliq Urdu[1], which is a font that uses the nastaliq flavor of the Arabic script (as compared to the more widely used naskh flavor, which you're most probably seeing in Chrome's rendering).

What's curious to me is that Apple only uses Noto Nastaliq Urdu if Urdu is enabled in preferred languages and is higher than any other Arabic-script language. [2] Is that so on your machine?

[1] https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Nastaliq+Urdu?pr... (There's a slight difference in the placement of diacritics here because of a newer font version.)

[2] https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/latin-fonts-correct...

In some discussion about Arabic rendering on another website[0], it was pointed out that the Basmala is its own codepoint in part because it is (or was?) a legal requirement on Pakistani documents and comes from an Urdu character-set. It's possible that, as a character effectively originating from and used by Urdu speakers, Apple defaults it to Nastaliq regardless of your font settings.

0: https://lobste.rs/s/7s4sjp/u_fdfd_arabic_ligature_bismillah_...

Ah!

Or, it could be that out of all system fonts on MacOS, only Noto Nastaliq Urdu has a glyph for the bismillah, and thus the system uses it as a fallback...

If anyone wants to take a peek into the Unicode codepoint, here's an indispensable tool: https://r12a.github.io/app-conversion/index.html

Interestingly, pasting it in a new VS Code tab renders it like the browser does (the wide version), but the tab and suggested filename is the Nastaliq style.