Relative Difficulty of Freehand Simulation of Four Proportional Elements in Arabic Signatures

This article compares the success with which 901 Arabic writers were able to simulate 4 proportional elements—size, slant, baseline, and spacing—in 2 Arabic signatures. Significant differences in ease of simulation were found among all 4 elements: slant was significantly more successfully simulated than the other 3; baseline was significantly more successfully simulated than spacing or size; and spacing was significantly more successfully simulated than size. The order of ease of simulation was found to be slant > baseline > spacing > size. This similarity between Arabic and Roman script data raises the possibility that slant and baseline, and possibly all 4 elements, might show similar relative rankings in other cursive scripts.