Advancement in digital-image processing hardware has given the printing industry novel facilities for capturing fonts and has provided new grounds for character scaling, which is an important issue in typesetting and graphical text. An algorithm for digital character scaling by a contour method is developed and implemented. The algorithm is based on scaling the contour of the character through a transformation. Cubic splines are used to interpolate the discrete samples of the contour character. Final results show no jaggies. The algorithm is applied to Arabic fonts and compared to two other algorithms: replication and telescoping template. The superior performance of the contour method is attributed to the cubic spline fitting, which gives better smoothness to the edge of the character.>