The Perso-Arabic script was originally developed for its aesthetic appeal, rather than for efficient documentation. It was only in the early 19th century, with the introduction of the printing industry to Iran and the region, that efforts were made to improve its practical usefulness for documentation. These improvements were largely driven by Western influences, with minimal contributions from native users like ourselves.

Major issues of the current perso-arabic alphabet


Writing direction

All languages have a writing direction, which has changed at various points in their development history. It's unclear why one language chooses one direction while another uses the other. However, we shouldn't underestimate the influence of scripting tools and media, such as hammer and chisels on stone, stylus on clay tablet, quill on paper, etc.


With the computer era and its widespread use as a medium for documentation, many languages such as Japanese and Chinese have changed their writing direction to left-to-right (LTR) to comply with this environment. Arabic and Persian languages also need to adapt their writing direction to take advantage of all the available functionality of this new tool. As you may know, many advanced text processing, manipulating, and management features either do not exist for right-to-left (RTL) scripts or are malfunctioning. Additionally, in Perso-Arabic scripts, texts are written right-to-left, while numbers are written left-to-right. This mix of right-to-left and left-to-right flow adds unnecessary complexity to documentation algorithms and usage. Moreover, the ubiquitous use of Latin words in today's texts exacerbates the problem.


Conjoint letters

In the Perso-Arabic alphabet, some letters must conjoin adjacent letters in a word, while others should not. This combination of joining and non-joining letters, which is useful in handwriting and calligraphy, has been carried over to the digital world with no significant benefit. Still, it has reduced readability and increased the complexity of tasks such as converting image text to editable text.


Capital letters' anomaly

In Perso-Arabic writings, capital letters only appear at the end of each word. These letters add to the beauty of words and the overall writing by extending below the baseline, above it, to the left, or the right. This irregularity restricts them from appearing elsewhere in words. However, imposing order on these letters allows us to use them freely in words. This makes it possible to use them to express concepts such as abbreviations and emphasize words.


Too many dots

The Arabic alphabet developed from an early form known as the dotless Kufic alphabet. This early form had very similar or even identical glyphs, which made it difficult to read, especially for non-Arabic speakers. To address this issue, dots and diacritics were added to certain glyphs instead of creating entirely new ones. While this decision may have been made for the sake of simplicity, it actually made the text less readable, as seen in the addition of the letters Peh "پ", Tcheh "چ", Jeh "ژ", and Gaf "گ" to the Persian alphabet. The presence of numerous dots in a language's alphabet can hinder the readability of its texts.