Those "snakes" do exist in Arabic for justification purpose (they are formatting controls insertable between pairs of joined letters and possibly used as base holders for diacritics).
Otherwise they are just normal "filler" (punctuation-like symbols like leader dots, otherwise "crap text"). The Arabic tatweel is very smart (better than extending the only spacing that applies only between words and better than breaking words with interletter spacing or changing the shape of letters, or packing letters to remove their normal spacing gap and creating collisions). Technically such "tatweel" also exist in Latin with its cursive form (with joined letters), and possibly as well in cursive forms of Greek and Cyrillic. But they are still not encoded at all (as formatting controls), even if they could also be used as base holders for some left-side or right-side diacritics. 2016-05-04 9:07 GMT+02:00 Mark Davis ☕️ <m...@macchiato.com>: > Very nice! > > Mark > > On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:54 AM, Julian Bradfield <jcb+unic...@inf.ed.ac.uk > > wrote: > >> See >> http://xkcd.com/1676/ >> (making sure to look at the mouse-over text) >> >> -- >> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in >> Scotland, with registration number SC005336. >> >> >