Yeah I think it’s a clarity thing. Numbers are often going to be the most important parts of the document (price, date, identification) and they need to be clear and differentiable from the other text.
Also older cursive was much more flamboyant than what we learned a few decades ago. Only calligraphic numbers will still look fancy, cursive writing will just slant the number and also you learn to write them perfectly consistently
Modern cursive is almost entirely just normal letters modified to have connectors (and being slanted) but there are a few weird letters like r, s, f, z which wouldn’t be connectable written normally.
So we’ve definitely been shifting to everything looking standardized anyway.
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 hours ago
I’ve been thinking about it a bit and I think it would be pretty easy to connect multiple zeros at the top, and maybe a few other numbers, but that explanation makes sense as for why numbers were not connected usually.
gustofwind@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
People do connect multiple zeros at the top
The real thing with zero is you’re supposed to use a slash across it so it’s impossible to mistake for a o or O