The Path to Dijkstra’s Handwriting

Reading One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, some years back, one element of the stories that stood out was the emphasis many of the characters put not merely in their writing skills (literacy being uncommon, and hence distinguishing), but also in their knowledge of multiple scripts. Literacy was not just the ability to write.

It's one of those details I've always meant to return to, to see what the background to that practice was, of the scripts and their diffferences, and of the connotations of each. Also of the significance of meaning at different levels: fonts or handwritten script, words, sentence structure, narrative, style. It all hangs together.

As any afficionado, or foe, of fonts, say, Papayrus or Comic Sans, can tell you, the forms of letters does carry meaning and significance.

(I had a literal laugh-out-loud moment reading Pivoxy's config file and realising it specifies comin sans as the default font for its Windows console log output.)