Last year / Later this year
After some consideraation, I think I know why that is. We (Europeans and their descendants in other countries like the USA) have a 500-year history of thousands of printers printing books and newspapers and designing new fonts that are more readable. And if I (as a human reader) can tell the difference between this letter and that, then I can write code to tell the computer to make the same discrimination. I suspect that most modern OCR engines use neural nets, which do not have that advantage. By comparison, a thousand years ago text fonts were designed to be easier to write, because the total time to hand-write a page often exceeded the total time of all readers reading it.
Here's where the Moral Absolutes come in: The Christian value system -- as taught in the Bible, but not often taught from the pulpits in churches -- is based on the Golden Rule (GR). About the time of the invention of the printing press (and perhaps for some of the same reasons) Martin Luther and John Wycliffe translated the Bible into their respective language of the people, and the Protestants taught their congregation to read and obey it. So thoughtful (Protestant) Christians tried to live the GR, which basically meant they wanted to make life better for everybody, including the readers of the printed books and newspapers. Which led to more readable fonts. And everybody benefits from their efforts, including the Catholics with no reason to do it themselves.
By contrast, Hebrew has been a dead language for some 2600 years (until the recreation of the nation of Israel in 1948), and the language was preserved almost entirely in hand-written Bibles. The number of readers was hundreds (or perhaps thousands after the Protestants made Bible reading more popular, so translators needed to know Hebrew), which did not justify making the fonts more readable -- until it became a spoken language again in 1948. In Israel today the Hebrew font faces are evolving to be much more readable, in part because Jewish rabbis teach their adherents the GR. Islam has no such moral teaching, so there is little incentive to better the life of other people in Muslim cultures, and their printed text reflects that lack of virtue, both hard to read and hard to print. Not My Problem.
The USA, having removed the statement of Moral Absolutes from schoolroom walls some 40 years ago, thereby giving school kids (and their successors) implicit permission to lie, cheat, steal, rape, and murder (just don't get caught, but nobody expects to get caught), and some of those kids are now grown up and designing new fonts... Have you ever noticed the new trend in numerals, that they distinguish zero from the letter Oh by a slanted crossbar that makes it hard to distinguish from eight? In the Goode Olde Dayes, the letter Oh was wider than a zero, and no more distinction was ever necessary, because letters and digits were never mixed, so you always knew, but if you didn't, the letter was rounder and wider. Today there is one and only one circumstance where digits and letters are jumbled together, and that is in computer passwords, which nobody ever gets to read anyway, because they are so hard to memorize that we have software tools to type them, and they are never displayed anyway. There are hundreds -- even thousands -- of contexts where the quick determination of and eight from a zero is important, like when you are reading the time off a digital watch or a (stupid) "smart" phone that tells you it's "18:88" in the morning. People no longer care about making life better for their customers, it's "my way or the hiway."
Moral absolutes, given by God to make life better for everybody.
Last year / Later this year
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