This article is wonderful. It's interesting, it's captivating, full with detail, and to think I never gave much thought about Arabic rendering before.

This part nearly had me chuckle audibly:

He says yes. The result is "Simplified Arabic": initial fused into medial, final into isolated, ligatures dropped. It conquers the Arab newsroom in a generation. Mrowa is assassinated at his desk eight years later, by an unrelated faction, in an unrelated dispute.

Also, it's depressing how hundreds of millions of people couldn't even get their language typeset on a computer, and our industry meanwhile was busy building AI-native AI for your groceries (have we mentioned it has AI btw?) and similar performative bullshit.

maybe AI will solve this ?