Do you really think "those Arabs and what-not" did not have printing before Unicode condescended to "accommodate them" in 1988? Traditional printing could very well do Indic scripts, and so could typewriters. And so could computers: in fact, Unicode for Indic scripts takes inspiration from ISCII, an Indian standard extending ASCII for encoding scripts on computers, that dates back to 1983.

I downvoted you for this: our guidelines require you to assume the strongest interpretation of the comment you are responding to. From my perspective, you’re comment is needlessly reactionary to a thoughtful, well stated question.

Sorry to include this lecture, but it helps my conscious to avoid drive-by downvoting. I’m very much open to a rebuttal.

(This is a different part of the guidelines than "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation" BTW: the comment very explicitly suggests non-Latin scripts not having had "much printing press and typewriter use", so I don't think there's much scope for interpretation there. And in fact, the idea is inherently a condescending and colonialist one—of Western superiority over unsophisticated "those" people—even though it may well be held innocently and stated as such. But I do take the point about not responding to the person, and responding kindly to the idea instead. Will try harder, as I think I usually do.)

(BTW "reactionary" means something specific…)

    • U+0915: DEVANAGARI LETTER KA (क)
    • U+093F: DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN I  (ि)

Similarly, the sequence

    • U+‎0915: DEVANAGARI LETTER KA (क)
    • U+‎094D: DEVANAGARI SIGN VIRAMA ( ्)
    • ‎U+0937: DEVANAGARI LETTER SSA (ष)
    • ‎U+0941: DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN U ( ु)

This is kind of touched upon in the second section in the original post titled "Indic scripts": https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2017/01/15/breaking-our-l...

This is handled in traditional printing (and in modern Opentype fonts) by simply having separate pieces of type for every possible combination of consonants (there are a few hundred, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Devanagari_conjun...), and then having separate pieces of type for vowel signs (which have to have different lengths depending on the width of the consonant cluster, but a handful of lengths for each will do), the same way any good Latin-script font will include ligatures like fi, and will also include separate glyphs for the accent marks (things like ´ ` ¨ ˆ ˜ which can be placed over letters to give é à ü î ñ and so on).

Incidentally, Gutenberg's very first Bible itself used nearly 300 letter forms, including ligatures and variants of several letter (see e.g. https://www.oldbookappreciator.com/libraryofhistoricaltype/e... )

(About "cursive" vs "separate" letters: conceptually it's not such a big difference, because there are only finitely many letters/characters in the script, so as long as you carefully specify the ending position of each glyph for each possible choice of following glyph, you produce the appearance of everything being joined. Indeed that's how traditional printing and modern fonts do it too. And for that matter, cursive fonts in English: try playing with https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Cedarville+Cursive which if it had been made with slightly better kerning rules would likely modify shapes of letters depending on adjacent letters. Maybe one of these fonts do it? https://fontsgeek.com/search/?q=cursive )

[1]: https://www.dizajndesign.sk/en/font/skolske

it wasn't an accident, the printing press was banned by the ottoman empire in 1485.

Cursive has existed alongside print letters going all the way back to antiquity.

Both forms existed before print, during the inception of print, and long after print.

It does sound rather snarky

Your comment on the other hand… /snark