Rasm (Skeleton)
الرسم
I see the bones of every letter underneath the dots.
If I peel the dots and marks off, I'm left with the rasm (رسم) — about 18 base shapes that build all 28 Arabic letters. Once I could see the skeleton, the alphabet stopped feeling like 28 separate things and started looking like a few families wearing different dots.
Historical Significance
Early Arabic manuscripts were often written without dots, relying on context and reader expertise to distinguish letters. The addition of dots (iʿjām) was a later standardization that made the script more accessible. For type designers, rasm is a foundational concept: designing the skeleton well means that all dotted variants built on it will be consistent. Poor rasm design creates compounding problems across the entire character set.