European printers lacking Arabic fonts forced scholars to transliterate Arabic into Hebrew

Evidence

Though there were certainly fewer individuals who were fluent in Greek, still it was not unknown for scholars to converse in that language (and of course Greek was esteemed as an essential tool for New Testament studies). Besides Latin, Hebrew was also more or less essential for Orientalists because most printers lacked an Arabic font so that scholars who wanted to publish in the field were often reduced to transliterating Arabic words into Hebrew, so that the Arabic Aliph became a Hebrew Aleph, the Arabic Ba a Hebrew Beth, and so forth. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 150

Categorization

• CANDY: The image of Arabic words spelled out in Hebrew letters because no printer owned an Arabic font is a delightfully nerdy trivia nugget about the material constraints of 17th-century scholarship.

Related

• Rome printed Arabic books chiefly to convert Eastern Christians (similarity 0.79)
• Publishing scholarship in a language one cannot read is intellectually indefensible. (similarity 0.78)