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Comment by dunefox | Hacker News Reader

That's not arabic, rather just cursive.

But quite clearly designed to draw a connection to the Bedouin-inspired Fremen, and general North African-like setting.

I'm old enough to have mainly used cursive in school and I definitely had the thought that it seemed like a vaguely arabic-inspired cursive when I saw it the flourishes on the D.

The flourishes in the D of that cover are exactly how I was taught to write the uppercase D in cursive at school. I remember (as a kid) thinking it was odd that to write a `D` one had to start by writing an `I`, but never questioned it.

But from looking at examples of cursive on google images, it seems like that form is no longer as prominent.

The flourishes in the D of that cover are exactly how I was taught to write the uppercase D in cursive at school.

We've now established that you went to school in Arab, and this is why you wrote D in Arabic, for at no point did you counter this logic.

(I am using chatgpt reasoning here)

I disagree.

The wide gamut in line thickness and the orientation of it is typical for Arabic fonts, but not for cursive ones.

Personally, this kind of line reminds me of a arab dagger even.

The variations in line thickness are exactly what you’d get with a calligraphy pen (and pens before ball points like fountain pens, quills) and are a function of the consistent direction of the pen and the smoothly varying direction the line is being written. So you will see it in all old pen/quill writing styles.

No, not like this. You'd get a different kind of variation in line thickness. That was the main point of my comment, but apparently I didn't explain it well.

Many children have grown up these days without learning cursive in school, thus every time they see squiggly fonts they think Arabic first.

Given the Arakkis language is based on Arabic, I would not be surprised that the typographic design of Dune fonts is supposed to evoke a feeling of Arabic

My grandmother noticed graffiti tags, which are very ornate generally, and concluded that they were written in arabic.

> Many children have grown up these days without learning cursive in school, thus every time they see squiggly fonts they think Arabic first.

Wait, are you saying that children in US schools write in block letters these days? That must be slow!

Contrary to what olduns would have us believe, cursive is NOT [fundamentally] faster than printing. Rather, the people who have trouble 'printing' quickly seem to be those who rarely 'print' their letters.

Also interesting to me that, among people who use cursive, both difficulty producing legible cursive and complaining about being unable to read somebody's cursive (sometimes their own) seems more common.

> Contrary to what olduns would have us believe, cursive is NOT [fundamentally] faster than printing.

Do you have links to back that up? Due to my illegible cursive I often fill all kinds of forms in block letters and definitely _feel_ that it is much slower.

I'd start by saying that illegible writing should be a disqualifier for comparison of speed. Slow down until it's legible!

Some factors affecting which writing method is fastest for you, (while remaining legible to others and your later self, include which one you use the most, and drippiness of the ink. Runny ink (or paint!) can be more prone to blotches, soak-through, and other blemishes, especially when printing, lending itself better to constant movement and cursive.

You may find that a hybrid of semi-joined and unjoined lettering fastest. I do not recommend shorthand if someone else will have to read it; shorthand is notoriously variant between practioners.

Anecdata from people I've talked to or my own experience about writing faster than cursive users in our cohorts won't help anybody much. Nor will my discovery that straight-stroke runes allowed me to keep up when taking notes from a particularly fast-talking history teacher. So, about the request for links… (-:

The link I reached for returned 404, and isn't in Archive.org (one truncated PDF file, which won't open), so I went digging. Wellll… raking, more like. Mostly, I found articles and posts claiming either "cursive is faster" or "no conclusive evidence for any claimed benefits of cursive". Consequently, I turned to:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cursive

Of the 7 relevant-seeming papers I've read so far, and another 4 grepped, I'm seeing (1) tiny cohorts with either no significant speed difference or small improvement with cursive, (2) usually turned out to be testing the wrong thing (like how fast a cohort's speed with one method improved, without comparison to any other method; or whether teaching one or another method affected the subjects' ability to read in general), (3) sometimes no attempt to account for legibility.

For me, all the extra loops and curves seem to conspire to make me fit less writing in the same space and use more ink/pencil/whatever.

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