Print culture, and the printing technologies upon which it rests, are far from monolithic. This paper challenges the universalizing tenor of print history by examining Arabic script in relation to a variety of printing technologies. The conflation and confusion of these varied technologies support grand historical narratives, such as a perceived “delay” in Arabic print adoption. But printing arrived in the Islamic and Arabic world through various means. Some print technologies were adopted quickly, while others spread more slowly. In line with the panel, this paper draws upon Muhammad Nadim’s 1948 memo as a starting point. Nadim was writing at a particular moment in print history, and his suggestion to reduce the number of Arabic forms addresses the specific problem of moveable Arabic type. Arabic script maintains a long and troubled relationship with mechanical typesetting. Reducing a rich calligraphic tradition to a limited number of repeatable forms (i.e. a typeface) diminishes the beauty and aesthetic possibilities of the script. The setting of moveable type, however, is only one of multiple printing options. Over a century before Nadim’s memo, lithography began to challenge moveable type as the preferred technology for reproducing Arabic script. Unlike moveable type, lithography can reproduce an entire hand-drawn page, and it was quickly adopted across the Middle East and South Asia after its invention in 1790. By printing images, rather than strings of letters, lithography supported the preservation and distribution of calligraphic specimens. Moveable type, in contrast, distributed standardized and mass-produced texts that were perceived as the foundation of a modern nation state. These competing processes offered different sets of affordances and limitations for Arabic script, and the debates of Arabic print culture navigate the textual and technical spaces that separate these two poles. The paper concludes by extending these debates into the digital realm. Many of the issues raised by Nadim’s memo remain relevant. Digital text encodings, like the moveable type of earlier eras, parcel language into distinct characters. Nadim’s suggestion of a limited number of repeatable forms is mirrored in the programming of the Unicode standard and other encoding schemes. These codes, in turn, influence the possibilities of Arabic search, the display of Arabic text, the separation of text and image-based file formats, and the scanning of Arabic OCR. By reopening and rereading the technical notes of Arabic print history, we reassess the digital present and reimagine the digital future.