Another challenge for representing Arabic a display made of line segments is all the curves. If it weren't for the dots, I imagine you could write consonant-onl

Another challenge for representing Arabic a display made of line segments is all the curves. If it weren't for the dots, I imagine you could write consonant-only Arabic on something close to a seven-segment display, although it would look bizarre because all the letters would be isolated and there would be so many more straight line segments than in normal Arabic script. (An absolute majority of the isolated forms of Arabic letters are made up only of curves, whereas an absolute majority of Latin capital letters are made up only of straight line segments!) I wonder how Arabic ended up with characters that differ only by dot positioning (like ب ت ث, and also ن whose combining form is especially similar to the combining forms of those). By contrast, the most similar Latin characters might be EF / CG / IJ / MN / UV which I think are clearly more different than the Arabic characters that differ only by dot quantity and positioning. (The Il1| are also famously confusable in some Latin fonts, but one could say having to worry about these comes late in the history of Latin script writing. Although the scribal minim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_(palaeography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_(palaeography) used at some points to write u, i, m, and n is every bit as confusing as any Arabic character.)