> Your entire argument is “look at how clever I am!”, which is fundamentally off-topic when talking about rendering text properly.

I think this is a really uncharitable read of this conversation. This thread has been about the veracity and the relevance of the author's claim that "two billion people can read Arabic to some degree".

I don't think anyone is trying to refute the author's conclusion that Arabic text rendering is important. I also don't think anyone is trying to show off how clever they are.

Personally, I agree with the author's conclusion, and I thought the post was really neat! But I also think the 2 billion statistic weakened their argument -- it's better to omit a statistic than include the wrong one.