Why are cursive scripts often long in their writing direction?
I briefly considered changing a horizontal script i'm working on to be vertical, but realized i shouldn't because most of the characters are much taller than they are wide (wasting space vertically), and they'd be uncomfortable to write sideways. That brought to mind another script that started vertical and cursive, but also takes up a lot more vertical than horizontal space per character.
It's not just that one script i made that does this. I see it in many vertical scripts in Reddit's neography community, Ta'agra, and even Arabic.
So why does it seem like cursive horizontal scripts have wider characters than similar print horizontal scripts, and cursive vertical scripts have taller characters than similar print vertical scripts? Am i just seeing patterns where none exist because i'm up at 01:00 doing neography instead of going to bed?
If I understand your question, the reason that scripts have a tendency to be longer in the direction they're written is because it's easier to stretch characters in the direction you're writing than any other direction. It's normal to make things longer because one direction is easier than another. If I had to reccomened any material on this it'd be the Mongolic script and stroke order of logographic writing like mandarin (which has a bias of left to right top to bottom).