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B612 is a highly legible open source font to be used on aircraft cockpit screens
- informatimago 8y agoOnly the parentheses look like brackets. Everything else looks quite nice. But for lisp programming, those bracket-looking parentheses are ugly...
- Syzygies 8y agoLisp is the canary in the mind shaft. All programming languages have a bracket problem; Lisp just has a more intense bracket problem. Until the recent advent of 4K and "retina" displays, it wasn't practical to have significant weight variations in screen fonts for programming. It's now practical, and it's easy in font editors such as Glyphs Mini to swap in or modify brackets to be a lighter weight. I've made many Lisp coding experiments: with preprocessors that eliminate most parentheses, with alternate symbols, and with various weights and sizes of parentheses. There's something to be said for the theory that parentheses should be lower case, just like identifiers. (I'm reminded of the "GET OFF MY LAWN" effect in Common Lisp; one can shut off the upper case defaults but most people don't stay around long enough to find out.) However, my favorite approach is to make parentheses light, but not too light. There's a sweet spot where you actually love the lightweight brackets, in Lisp code and everywhere else. You're conducting an orchestra, not engaging in a knee-jerk debate; if the trumpets play too loud, teach them to play at the right volume. It took me ten minutes to swap in ()[]{} from SourceCodePro-ExtraLight, and copy a period into the center of the zero. This a fine Lisp font but not my favorite. I like Input Mono, or Courier Prime Code (both similarly modified). http://input.fontbureau.com/ http://input.fontbureau.com/ The Input download can be customized to look nearly identical to B612, only better, and without the O0 and () problems.
- burfog 8y agoLighter??? You mean thin? Lowercase is what, short like the 'x'? That is exactly the opposite of a good programming font. These characters should be extra-tall. They should go at least as low as any other ASCII character, and at least as high as any other ASCII character. An extra pixel (or several on a 4K display) upward would be even better, up there with the accented uppercase letters like A-with-ring.
- Syzygies 8y agoI'm using the standard terminology in the font industry. My borrow font for brackets is called SourceCodePro-ExtraLight, not SourceCodePro-ExtraThin. And yes, lowercase as in the same height as lowercase letters. That was an interesting experiment that I rejected. I prefer light (thin) brackets that enclose everything, as you say. Lisp is in decline in part because of the community tendency to circle the wagons in the face of any criticism. My single point is that Lisp parentheses are always too heavy, and readability improves with lighter parentheses. I've also long used Unicode replacements for => and other combined symbols in Haskell. Then I discovered Hasklig, solving this problem instead through ligatures. Any problem one can solve in the font itself is transparent to the rest of one's tool chain. I'm a convert.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> lowercase as in the same height as lowercase letters Lowercase letters are just as tall as capitals...
- jdietrich 8y agoAaCcEeGgMmNnOoPpQqRrSsUuVvWwXxYyZz.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoYou're missing some letters. And even among the ones you listed, g, p, q, and y are fully as tall as every capital except Q.
- jacobolus 8y agoInstead of using thinner glyph shapes, just change your syntax highlighting to reduce contrast on the brackets.
- pvg 8y agoUntil the recent advent of 4K and "retina" displays, it wasn't practical to have significant weight variations in screen fonts for programming. Really? Bolded keywords and other tweakery was common on 512×342 OG Mac screens.
- Syzygies 8y agoDid you like how that looked? I didn't. The resolution wasn't ready. The resolution certainly didn't support going lighter. I'm trying to understand why lightweight Lisp parentheses haven't been a thing for 50 years. It's so obviously right once one tries it, with sufficient resolution. My guess is that "sufficient resolution" is both key, and recent.
- theoh 8y agoI'd guess that most people who value typographic nuance and clarity find Lisp's lack of concessions to syntax makes reading code an extremely clunky experience. I think Lisp's (lack of) syntax adds up to a set of tradeoffs that actively repels visual thinkers/typography folks, compared to Miranda-style syntax. NB Haskell folks are not any more likely than Lispers to think visually. A lot of Haskell code is difficult to read. But it does feel like the Miranda-style syntax (particularly pattern matching) has made the first few steps towards eliminating unnecessary structure-related cognitive load on the programmer. Lisp partisans will probably reject this opinion, but IMO the presence of strings of matching parens in Lisp isn't something that needs to be restyled with a better font, it's something that needs to be designed out of the language. Edit: I know this ground has been well-covered in the past. Usually the advice is that by using a proper editor and relying on indentation, parens just stop being a noticeable problem. Whether just restyling parens is cosmetic or not, it seems less powerful even than that advice.
- Syzygies 8y agoScheme is a stunningly beautiful language with inferred parentheses: define | edge? g e let $ es | edges g e2 | reverse e or (member e es) (member e2 es) I used to rely on a preprocessor that translates back and forth to standard Scheme: (define (edge? g e) (let ( (es (edges g)) (e2 (reverse e))) (or (member e es) (member e2 es)))) One gives up being able to use standard tools. For Emacs or Vim, one can write one's own tools, but it's nice to be able to try out everyone else's work first. The central question for any programming language isn't how comfortably it welcomes casual newcomers; it's how effectively it creates a human:machine interface for the committed. Most criticisms of how Lisp looks can be likened to criticisms of a frozen screen from a crashed video game. One needs to play the video game. Lisp acquires its meaning in short time scales from the experience of syntax-aware editing, a live experience. Lisp acquires its meaning in long time scales from the experience of using macros to rewrite the language to exactly suit the problem at hand. Haskell is safer, faster, more densely expressive, but not as plastic. Lisp appeals to woodworkers; other languages appeal to people who like to buy nice furniture, sit in it and get to work. I can see both sides, and I've worked hard to experience both sides.
- marcosdumay 8y ago> All programming languages have a bracket problem Haskell doesn't. It's possible to fix the bracket problem, but it's not C-like so people will be forever complaining and refusing to learn your stupid crazy language.
- chrisbennet 8y agoI’ve got a couple of different radar screens that will look great with this font!
- SomeHacker44 8y agoTo this day, I marvel during turbulence at how much easier it was to read pointer gauges than modern strip/numerical display EFIS displays. Don't even get me started with the touch screen trend. Thanks for trying to make the EFIS more readable. Airbus.
- bmer 8y agoWhat does EFIS stand for? And, could I get you started on the touch screen trend?
- calvinmorrison 8y agoElectronic Flight Information System. The flight deck information display, but not mechanical, digital.
- danaliv 8y agoTouch screens installed in the instrument panel are very hard to use in even light-to-moderate turbulence. Have someone shake your phone around while you try to dial a number and you’ll have some idea of the difficulty. Knobs, and to a lesser extent physical buttons, give you something to hold onto. It may not sound like much of a difference but in my experience it’s much, much less error-prone to have hardware inputs when the aircraft is getting bounced around.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoTouch screens in cars are also a huge step backwards in usability from the buttons and knobs they replaced. I'm not sure why the switch happened.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoFor cars, my guess would be that a) it allows you to entirely disconnect the UI work from the work on actual car, and run it in parallel, and b) it looks cool and futuristic in ads. I don't see how either would apply for planes, though. There, I suspect it's an attempt to manage the amount of data a pilot needs to see at any given moment, and to enable equipment changes without rebuilding the cockpit.
- ggm 8y agoWhy leave zero/oh confusion possible by not slashing the zero?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- oakwhiz 8y agoI'm surprised they didn't cross or dot the zero. Surely differentiating O from 0 is important when eye fatigue is a problem?
- _trampeltier 8y agoProbably you know usually if it's a number or text. It's more a problem in product codes etc. But yes, I agree, it would be better with crossed zeros. I even cross zeros in my handwriting.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kaffeemitsahne 8y agoThe picture in the header does include slashed 0's though. Edit: the pdf included in the download has both variants of 0, the slashed one at unicode point E007. So it seems it's up to the user to pick one.
- olex 8y agoI imagine that a slashed zero would be used in places where both letters and numbers are possible, and a non-slashed one where only numbers are contextually expected. This seems to match the header picture: "5240N" uses a slashed zero, but all numbers-only indicators to the left are non-slashed.
- WouterSpaak 8y agoI would assume this is true. In French (where Airbus comes from) 'West' is called 'Ouest'. "5240O" would be a pain.
- mikl 8y agoOn the other hand, in Danish and Norwegian, East is "Øst", making slashed zeros awkward together with compass directions. Dotted zeros would be better.
- platz 8y agoit is a very wide font, compared to programming fonts which are more tall than wide.
- ncmncm 8y agoYet Another sans-serif face, with dubious claims for legibility, as usual only vs. other sans-serif faces. When will they learn? When will we?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y agoLearn what?
- ncmncm 8y agoThat where legibility matters, a sans font is the wrong place to start, or stop. Sans faces appeal to graphic designers for graphic-design reasons that have no connection to merit as a means to convey useful information clearly and quickly. Graphic designers prefer details that make text less legible for the actual people obliged to read it, who get no say in what is used.
- andai 8y agoI've been trying out many different fonts recently and settled on sans-serifs being more comfortable to read (in terms of word-shapes). Maybe it's a matter of exposure? If I spent more time reading books than blogs, I might find serifs more comfortable? Update: it looks (to me) like the biggest differences are in peripheral vision.
- int_19h 8y agoI have experimented with this for a long time, and I find that serifs make more sense for books, and generally large volumes of uninterrupted text, while sans-serifs make more sense for labels and other chrome. Interestingly, on the web, I still prefer sans-serif (Verdana especially). But perhaps it's because more than a page of two of text is relatively rare, and most sites are really more like apps in layout - a menu, various labels and buttons etc. Or interactive discussion like here, where each comment stands by itself. For book readers, Amazon's Bookerly is just perfect for reading hours straight. It's not as condensed as many serif fonts, and it keeps all strokes full-bodies, which makes it a lot easier on the eyes, IMO.
- enz 8y agoIf the font works, I suggest we use it on airports flights information displays too. Those are not always very legible... (with the slashed 0, of course)
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y agoOn Windows, it has quite an odd look in the font viewer. It seems like it is not being anti-aliased for some reason. The unusual cutouts also seem very prominent on a 4k screen. I'll probably still try it at work, but I am guessing this is not going to displace my current font of choice. Thank you for sharing!
- synack 8y agohttps://github.com/polarsys/b612 https://github.com/polarsys/b612
- tvanantwerp 8y agoThe colon and semicolon seem unusually small compared to other characters, making than rather hard to distinguish from one another. Trivial for a pilot perhaps, but rules it out for me as a possibility for programming.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- userbinator 8y agoFor comparison, Boeing uses Futura in their cockpits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futura_(typeface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futura_(typeface)
- bluejekyll 8y agoThe ‘i’ and ‘j’ seem like they could easily be mistaken.
- abrowne 8y agoLooks like it's all caps, so it doesn't matter: https://blog.epicpxls.com/the-font-that-landed-on-the-moon-abf9ab58f0b4 https://blog.epicpxls.com/the-font-that-landed-on-the-moon-a...
- mrob 8y agoThe 'p' and 'q' are mirror images here, which could be a problem for people with dyslexia. The new B612 font has clearly distinct shapes even after mirroring.
- EForEndeavour 8y agoThis sounds like a fair critique, but I'm not a dyslexia expert. Some honest questions: Doesn't dyslexia involve transposing the positions of characters, not mirroring individual characters? Or do some/most dyslexics also sometimes misread letters as their mirror-image counterparts? Considering dyslexics have difficulties with already very distinct shapes (i.e., most letters are pretty unique), would a relatively subtle difference between p and mirrored q actually reduce the error rate? Or is that "premature optimization" in that the drop in accuracy due to the p-q mirror images is dwarfed by the gain in accuracy of using Futura?
- mrob 8y agoI remember reading about dyslexics liking Comic Sans because the letters have distinct shapes even after transformation. This then inspired the creation of specialist fonts that are supposedly better, but since I last read about it there's been some research suggesting it doesn't actually help, so I retract my previous post. "Dyslexie font does not benefit reading in children with or without dyslexia": https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11881-017-0154-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11881-017-0154-...
- yardstick 8y agoWhy didn’t they put horizontal lines on the top & bottom of the uppercase I? I appreciate that I/i/l/L all look different, but if I was reading a word in that font for the first time and it had an I but not an L it could be easily confused.
- zamadatix 8y agoOn a similar note has anyone ever come up with a way to differentiate k/K more in regards to "not all characters are on screen to compare"-ability?
- jcims 8y agoI thought that was quite strange as well, particularly with the stated objectives of the font. Would be interesting to see if there was any discussion about it.
- KboPAacDA3 8y agoB612 is the name of the asteroid from Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince). The narrator is a pilot.
- dogma1138 8y agoSo was the author Antoine de-Saint Exupery
- jmwilson 8y agoTheir own legibility study shows it's about around the same as Verdana: https://i.imgur.com/M0C3TkY.png https://i.imgur.com/M0C3TkY.png (excerpt from the PDF in the download .zip, vertical axis is misidentifications). Their design goal was beating their current font (CDS), which seems a bit of a sandbagged goal if you look at the sample in the report. I wonder if we've reached a plateau of legibility for technical fonts after identifying the easy wins in typeface design for screens.
- jessriedel 8y agoNot disagreeing, but note that Verdana requires a license for certain kinds of commercial use (I think). https://www.fonts.com/font/microsoft-corporation/verdana/licenses https://www.fonts.com/font/microsoft-corporation/verdana/lic...
- Alex3917 8y ago> I wonder if we've reached a plateau of legibility for technical fonts after identifying the easy wins in typeface design for screens. I mean most likely the real design goal was to create a cool futuristic looking typeface that would make the planes themselves feel more technologically advanced. I have no doubt legibility was one of the main requirements, but let's not kid ourselves on why this was really commissioned. They did a great job though. I'm not a typography expert or even a designer, but to my untrained eye this looks like one of the most original and visually impressive typefaces I've seen in a while.
- vonseel 8y agoI’m surprised there’s a need for this kind of thing or even much of a difference between most sans serif fonts. It seems there are dozens if not hundreds of open source programming fonts which are all quite legible.
- ncmncm 8y agoIndeed, and none as legible as a serviceable serif font. Legibility was a solved problem literally centuries ago.
- aj7 8y agohttp://fly-out.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/B612-Leaflet.pdf http://fly-out.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/B612-Leaflet.p... More info
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoThis might be a weird question , but within topic. What makes fonts convey other information? Why is comic sans so derided? (It obviously is.) What makes the emotion of a font come out?
- gmueckl 8y agoConnotation. The glyphs themselves are mere shapes. We just come to associate certain styles with certain contexts through personal experience.
- peteretep 8y agoThis is a great question and I’d love to see some links / wild-ass guesses
- DoreenMichele 8y agoIt probably has a lot to do with things like how much it looks like actual handwriting. Whether you think it's bunk or not, there are people who think they can tell a lot about your personality through handwriting analysis and there are neurological conditions that impact handwriting, so it's not just outright crazy talk to think handwriting reflects something important about the author. So my assumption would be that to whatever degree humans associate handwriting with things like personality or personal disability, we will tend to associate those concepts with fonts that touch on similar patterns, if that makes sense. (Maybe not explained very clearly.)
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoPossibly. And I don't think its bunk.. but there's something with emotion tied up with fonts or handwriting. As to what it is, I have no good idea how to discern. But again, I cannot refuse the fact that comic sans is so.. derided and laughed at. Nary a week goes by without someone guffawing at that typeface on reddit or social media. Any ideas how to measure this? Seems like emotion is the key here.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
- hamiltont 8y agoI had a chuckle at the background image using ALLCAPS, which is infamous for its lack of legibility - e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps#Readability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps#Readability
- djpowell 8y agoHmm, I could imagine that the legibility of sentences and paragraphs, where you are pretty much reading a word at a time, is different from the legibility of things like codes where you are reading a character at a time. And for short words like table column headings, I suspect there isn't much difference either way.
- Maskawanian 8y agoThe all caps for readability likely comes from handwriting vs block print. I know for my self, when writing for others I block print rather than use cursive so that they can understand it easier. This likely has moved over to type as tradition rather than actual usability.
- Shorel 8y agoThat link claims that ALLCAPS tend to be read letter by letter. I find that claim to be completely false, as I am learning to read text written in Cyrillic alphabet, when I do actually read the words letter by letter and I even get surprised when I finish reading a word. In contrast, I can read text in all caps at about the same speed as lower case text. If there's any slowdown, I say I read all caps at 95% of the speed I read text in lowercase. Later the same page says this: "all-capital text was read 11.8 percent slower than lower case, or approximately 38 words per minute slower". In that case that later claim completely contradicts the former claim of letter by letter reading, which is IMO about five times slower, not just a few percent points slower. In any case, ALL CAPS text is perfectly legible, and it is actually more legible than using something like cursive, including lowercase cursive.
- blester 8y agoThe period is really close to the word it follows, it looks very strange in the monospaced version for programming.
- bluejekyll 8y agoPersonally, I still haven’t found a better font for reading and writing code than source code pro: https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/source-code-pro https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/source-code-pro B612 seems much more like a Helvetica derivative.
- ncmncm 8y agoSource Code Pro was a step down from Inconsolata that preceded it. It's not hard to see why people want to make more infinitesimally-different fonts with their own name and a funny ampersand or (in this case) parentheses. What is never explained is why anybody else should care.
- grzm 8y ago> ”Source Code Pro was a step down from Inconsolata that preceded it.” I’m not aware of any shared history between Inconsolata and Source Code Pro. Do you know of any? On the on there hand, Inconsolata is heavily influenced by Lucas De Groot’s Consolas.
- ncmncm 8y agoAs I noted, Inconsolata existed before they began work on SCP. It is an objective improvement on Consolas, and thus worthy of attention and change. Normally, when putting in the effort to make something new, one tries to make it better than what came before, on some axis. Introducing a new thing less good than what came before is a waste of our time and a distraction from the better things. I don't doubt that designing SCP or B612 was educational for its designers, but that is not a good enough reason to adopt it, or even to study whether to adopt it. The new thing should be better. Why is that hard to process?
- grzm 8y ago> "Introducing a new thing less good than what came before is a waste of our time and a distraction from the better things.... The new thing should be better. Why is that hard to process?" Using "good" and "better" implies that there's some objective measurement against a common set of criteria, which is not necessarily the case from the standpoint of the designers, nor for those who choose to use the fonts and for what purpose. Better according to you? Sure, but I'd frame that as an opinion rather than objective fact.
- winter_blue 8y agoI'd love it if HN could switch to this font. We use Verdana anyways, and B612 is close enough to it.
- vackosar 8y agoHow does it compare to OCR-A? OCR-A font was made to be recognizable by 60s OCR tech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A
- sprash 8y agoOCR-A is my favorite monospace font. Sadly unicode support is obviously rather limited if present at all.
- edoceo 8y agoI made my company logo with that font (c2000) - LOVE IT
- gattilorenz 8y agoFrom your link: > The design is simple so that it can be easily read by a machine, but it is more difficult for the human eye to read So, unless your plane is piloted by a robot from the 60s, quite favorably.
- yellowapple 8y agoWhat's the deal with the license? This page mentions only the Eclipse Public License, while the actual Polarsys page and the GitHub repo mention/include three different licenses: the EPL 1.0 (!!!), Eclipse Distribution License 1.0 (BSD-like), and SIL Open Font License 1.1. Should I take that to mean it's multi-licensed and I can use this font under whichever of those licenses I choose? If so, what's the point of making EPL and SIL licensing options when the EDL has far fewer strings attached (and is more obviously compatible with other licenses, notably the GPL)? Relevantly, the EPL 1.0 is incompatible with any version of the GNU GPL (as is the EPL 2.0 by default).
- matthewmacleod 8y agoOn a vaguely related theme, are there any open-source frameworks or designs for building things like embedded industrial dashboards or mission-critical control software? I’d love to build on something that already incorporated best practices.
- bloak 8y agoTwo other sans-serif fonts designed for legibility and widely tested: "Transport" font used in UK road signs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_(typeface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_(typeface) http://www.roads.org.uk/fonts http://www.roads.org.uk/fonts "Mandatory" font used in UK number plates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_(typeface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_(typeface) http://www.k-type.com/fonts/mandatory/ http://www.k-type.com/fonts/mandatory/
- sdfjkl 8y agoAlso DIN 1451: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_1451 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_1451
- ckozlowski 8y agoHighway Gothic for the U.S.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Gothic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Gothic
- leshow 8y agoI can't seem to get the font to show in vscode. I've installed the ttf fonts to ~/.fonts and refreshed my font cache, but "B612" as a font name doesn't seem to match anything, neither does "B612 Mono" or "Regular"