Suggestion: straight "handwritten" Arabic vowels for italic/cursive

[Paul Sladen]

I had the following suggestion conveyed to me verbally, based on the observation that handwritten Arabic tends towards straight vowel diacritics because it's faster than writing individual dots; in this case (straight for one dot, diagonal for two dots and a circumflex-like entity for three dots (or an approximation using Latin combining diacriticals would be: x̂x́x̄).

I've tried to knock-up a rough approximation of what that might look like (it is nothing more than a very quick mockup to convey the concept!). As a non-Arabic reader I know I won't have been able to get it right but hopefully by recording it here those people more used to Arabic script will be able to weigh-in on the sanity of it, or otherwise.

As I understand it, the current intention is to duplicate the Regular and Bold .ttfs files across the Italic and Bold-Italic styles too, effectively overriding synthetic oblique generation. From a technical point-of-view, AFAICT it wouldn't require engineering or hinting beyond replacement of just those diacriticals in question and hinting of those.