More on typography and philology

A typographical difficulty of devanagari in movable type kind of press is the high number of ligatures. To have single glyphs for every consonant-consontant and consonant-vowel combination seems unlikely. Upon close observation, it seems that vowel signs were independent types. But, when these were descendents and ascendents, these must have required room above and below the main lines, perhaps to be filled by blanks wherever ascendent and descendents were not there. In the NM editio princeps the leading (space between lines) is quite large, and a possible explanation (I doubt that at that time, given the costs of paper, there were aesthetic or readability reasons to keep wide leading) is the presence of these extra lines of ascendent and descendent vowel signs.