6 ms·

It drives me crazy when fonts look at the old convention of "strike through zero" and for some reason decides they need to be different from the convention and

by hnarn 8y ago

It drives me crazy when fonts look at the old convention of "strike through zero" and for some reason decides they need to be different from the convention and allow the strike to pass the edges of the zero circle. "Anka/Coder" in the linked article is guilty of this. When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero, it's a Danish or Norwegian "Ö" (Ø). It's been a part of their alphabet for centuries. The whole purpose of the "strike through zero" is to stop it from being mixed up with Omega. By badly thought out design and a need to be different for no reason, you just returned to square one, because the font is now unreadable for anyone that knows or works with the letter Ø.

andai 8y ago
∅
uasm 8y ago
> "When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero, it's a Danish or Norwegian "Ö" (Ø). It's been a part of their alphabet for centuries." You can't please all the people, all of the time. There are ~21 million people living in Scandinavia - and for them, that could indeed be somewhat of an issue. What about the rest of the planet? > "By badly thought out design and a need to be different for no reason, you just returned to square one, because the font is now unreadable for anyone that knows or works with the letter Ø." Out of curiosity, what would you consider to be a better design?
- detaro 8y ago
  > What would you consider to be a better design then? > > "When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero,
  - hinkley 8y ago
    Well, at least he wasn't belligerent. Noticing a lot of threads like that on Reddit lately. Hope it doesn't spread.
- Tsiklon 8y ago
  The strike should never pass the outer boundary of the 0. I believe that's the solution the Grandparent comment implied. Alternatively the strike could pass the alternative way through the symbol.
- stronglikedan 8y ago
  > what would you consider to be a better design I don't think there is one. The standard is the standard for a reason, and doesn't need to be better IMHO.
  - tigen 8y ago
    It looks less like an 8, so perhaps there is an advantage outside of Danish/Norwegian contexts.
- byproxy 8y ago
  Zero with dotted center, I'd imagine.
lordnacho 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98 Interesting history, there's a couple of theories.
superobserver 8y ago
I actually find the coin-style zero superior, like that shown in Hack font, as it avoids ambiguity with the Ø symbol.
- hnarn 8y ago
  I don't mind it, using an image for zero that is exclusive is of course preferable. But seeing how common the "slashed zero" is, I think the least we can do is avoid making it more confusing than it already is.
cr0sh 8y ago
So you're reading a number and then -blurp- your mind goes "Danish" or "Norwegian" letter? Context doesn't come into play? I mean - I can understand such confusion if you are dealing with some kind of multi-character random code or such (ie - a "confirmation code" for instance), and the site is primarily targeted to Danish or Norwegian users; in that case, the confusion would be valid. Much like such codes in "English" (maybe "Latin" might be a better description?), without having a distinguishing mark for the zero, and depending on the font used - where a zero can look like a capital letter "O". Was that "0" or "O"? That can be an issue, depending on the language of the users, etc. But aside from those particular cases, which aren't very frequent, most of the time you can infer what is meant by what, based on the context of the surrounding characters and the information that is likely being conveyed. I'm not sure one should get too upset by such a minor thing...?
- pmarreck 8y ago
  I would imagine that if you speak a language that includes that letter, it would be much more annoying
- interactivecode 8y ago
  it's about as annoying as finding the difference between a o or 0. it's about cognitive load
- hnarn 8y ago
  > So you're reading a number and then -blurp- your mind goes "Danish" or "Norwegian" letter? Yes, because my native language is Swedish, so I frequently come across this letter. > Context doesn't come into play? Would you use this argument against someone that said zero and the letter O are too similar? I doubt it, and I suspect your casual approach to this is based on the fact that you never encounter this letter.
- red_admiral 8y ago
  > So you're reading a number and then -blurp- your mind goes "Danish" or "Norwegian" letter? Yes. Once you become really fluent in a different script, I find that misuse of it starts to become really annoying. Before I had any proficiency in a language using the Cyrillic alphabet, if someone replaced say an A with a De (Д) or a W with a Sha (Ш) in an English text, I'd have no trouble reading it. Now, this kind of thing always trips me up and I've heard from several native speakers that they absolutely hate this kind of thing. To the people doing this to lyrics of metal songs in particular: please stop. If I had to have a guess at why, I'd say if you are fluent in English but not a Cyrillic language, then your "System 1" autocorrects such mistakes to the the closest English word without you noticing. Once the other letters start to mean something, you consciously notice the mistakes as such. (For an example of the mental "autocorrect", did you notice the repeated "the" above? h/t Scott Alexander.) Same idea with that game where you have words written in different colours but you have to read the colour instead of the word, so if "blue" is written in green you have to read "green". It's incredibly annoying in a language that you know, but really easy in a script/language that you don't know.
DavidVoid 8y ago
Personally I'm a fan of the dotted zero since it looks clean and doesn't get confused with an O or an Ø. I guess it could get confused with a theta but how often does that show up in variable names?
- ludwigschubert 8y ago
  ...we all said, and then ML became popular. :D (Lowercase ‘θ’ is quite common to indicate a vector of parameters. I’ll admit, though, that few people are ~courageous~ adventurous enough to use the actual symbol in their variable names rather than the string ‘theta’.)
- nielsbot 8y ago
  Input (Sans or Mono) lets you customize your own font, with slashed or dotted zero, when you download: http://input.fontbureau.com/download/ http://input.fontbureau.com/download/
kazinator 8y ago
> allow the strike to pass the edges of the zero circle That's what pretty much everyone does when whiteboarding. > When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero When a second stroke is added to the oval, it's no longer a zero to most people, other than programmers. When no such stroke is added, it's also the letter O to most people; far more people than just Danes and Norwegians. Nobody is jarred by the appearance of a letter in the middle of a number. The ambiguity is embraced in informal English, where zero is pronounced as "oh", like 007 being "double oh seven".
reaperducer 8y ago
need to be different from the convention and allow the strike to pass the edges of the zero circle For what it's worth, the first machines I ever did any work with had the zero with the slash through it. That's because the output was to a teletype which printed the letter O, then went back a space and punched a / on top of it. They also used a capital P for a question mark. Some printouts were horrific to read because a blank space was represented by a "b" with a / through it, not an underscore. So I think that for computing the 0 with a slash extending outside the line predates the 0 with the slash entirely inside the line. I'm not sure when or why the 0 with a dot in the middle became a thing. I first noticed it around 1989 on cheap (for the time) VGA cards.
- hnarn 8y ago
  > So I think that for computing the 0 with a slash extending outside the line predates the 0 with the slash entirely inside the line. For computing, sure. But the Danish letter pre-dates computers, likely by centuries, so the point still stands that an effort should be made to separate the two if at all possible. In your case it wasn't so much a choice as a result of technical limitations.
a_e_k 8y ago
In designing Luculent (shown in the original article at http://app.programmingfonts.org/#luculent http://app.programmingfonts.org/#luculent), my approach to was to use to reversed slash on the zero. It's somewhat unusual, but I did it precisely to avoid any ambiguity with the letter Ø that you point out. I could also have used a dot instead, but then that starts to look like an uppercase theta, Θ, at low resolutions. Squaring the zero a bit also helps.

by hnarn 8y ago

andai 8y ago

∅

uasm 8y ago

> "When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero, it's a Danish or Norwegian "Ö" (Ø). It's been a part of their alphabet for centuries." You can't please all the people, all of the time. There are ~21 million people living in Scandinavia - and for them, that could indeed be somewhat of an issue. What about the rest of the planet? > "By badly thought out design and a need to be different for no reason, you just returned to square one, because the font is now unreadable for anyone that knows or works with the letter Ø." Out of curiosity, what would you consider to be a better design?

detaro 8y ago
> What would you consider to be a better design then? > > "When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero,
- hinkley 8y ago
  Well, at least he wasn't belligerent. Noticing a lot of threads like that on Reddit lately. Hope it doesn't spread.
Tsiklon 8y ago
The strike should never pass the outer boundary of the 0. I believe that's the solution the Grandparent comment implied. Alternatively the strike could pass the alternative way through the symbol.
stronglikedan 8y ago
> what would you consider to be a better design I don't think there is one. The standard is the standard for a reason, and doesn't need to be better IMHO.
- tigen 8y ago
  It looks less like an 8, so perhaps there is an advantage outside of Danish/Norwegian contexts.
byproxy 8y ago
Zero with dotted center, I'd imagine.

lordnacho 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98 Interesting history, there's a couple of theories.

superobserver 8y ago

I actually find the coin-style zero superior, like that shown in Hack font, as it avoids ambiguity with the Ø symbol.

hnarn 8y ago
I don't mind it, using an image for zero that is exclusive is of course preferable. But seeing how common the "slashed zero" is, I think the least we can do is avoid making it more confusing than it already is.

cr0sh 8y ago

So you're reading a number and then -blurp- your mind goes "Danish" or "Norwegian" letter? Context doesn't come into play? I mean - I can understand such confusion if you are dealing with some kind of multi-character random code or such (ie - a "confirmation code" for instance), and the site is primarily targeted to Danish or Norwegian users; in that case, the confusion would be valid. Much like such codes in "English" (maybe "Latin" might be a better description?), without having a distinguishing mark for the zero, and depending on the font used - where a zero can look like a capital letter "O". Was that "0" or "O"? That can be an issue, depending on the language of the users, etc. But aside from those particular cases, which aren't very frequent, most of the time you can infer what is meant by what, based on the context of the surrounding characters and the information that is likely being conveyed. I'm not sure one should get too upset by such a minor thing...?

pmarreck 8y ago
I would imagine that if you speak a language that includes that letter, it would be much more annoying
interactivecode 8y ago
it's about as annoying as finding the difference between a o or 0. it's about cognitive load
hnarn 8y ago
> So you're reading a number and then -blurp- your mind goes "Danish" or "Norwegian" letter? Yes, because my native language is Swedish, so I frequently come across this letter. > Context doesn't come into play? Would you use this argument against someone that said zero and the letter O are too similar? I doubt it, and I suspect your casual approach to this is based on the fact that you never encounter this letter.
red_admiral 8y ago
> So you're reading a number and then -blurp- your mind goes "Danish" or "Norwegian" letter? Yes. Once you become really fluent in a different script, I find that misuse of it starts to become really annoying. Before I had any proficiency in a language using the Cyrillic alphabet, if someone replaced say an A with a De (Д) or a W with a Sha (Ш) in an English text, I'd have no trouble reading it. Now, this kind of thing always trips me up and I've heard from several native speakers that they absolutely hate this kind of thing. To the people doing this to lyrics of metal songs in particular: please stop. If I had to have a guess at why, I'd say if you are fluent in English but not a Cyrillic language, then your "System 1" autocorrects such mistakes to the the closest English word without you noticing. Once the other letters start to mean something, you consciously notice the mistakes as such. (For an example of the mental "autocorrect", did you notice the repeated "the" above? h/t Scott Alexander.) Same idea with that game where you have words written in different colours but you have to read the colour instead of the word, so if "blue" is written in green you have to read "green". It's incredibly annoying in a language that you know, but really easy in a script/language that you don't know.

DavidVoid 8y ago

Personally I'm a fan of the dotted zero since it looks clean and doesn't get confused with an O or an Ø. I guess it could get confused with a theta but how often does that show up in variable names?

ludwigschubert 8y ago
...we all said, and then ML became popular. :D (Lowercase ‘θ’ is quite common to indicate a vector of parameters. I’ll admit, though, that few people are ~courageous~ adventurous enough to use the actual symbol in their variable names rather than the string ‘theta’.)
nielsbot 8y ago
Input (Sans or Mono) lets you customize your own font, with slashed or dotted zero, when you download: http://input.fontbureau.com/download/ http://input.fontbureau.com/download/

kazinator 8y ago

> allow the strike to pass the edges of the zero circle That's what pretty much everyone does when whiteboarding. > When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero When a second stroke is added to the oval, it's no longer a zero to most people, other than programmers. When no such stroke is added, it's also the letter O to most people; far more people than just Danes and Norwegians. Nobody is jarred by the appearance of a letter in the middle of a number. The ambiguity is embraced in informal English, where zero is pronounced as "oh", like 007 being "double oh seven".

reaperducer 8y ago

need to be different from the convention and allow the strike to pass the edges of the zero circle For what it's worth, the first machines I ever did any work with had the zero with the slash through it. That's because the output was to a teletype which printed the letter O, then went back a space and punched a / on top of it. They also used a capital P for a question mark. Some printouts were horrific to read because a blank space was represented by a "b" with a / through it, not an underscore. So I think that for computing the 0 with a slash extending outside the line predates the 0 with the slash entirely inside the line. I'm not sure when or why the 0 with a dot in the middle became a thing. I first noticed it around 1989 on cheap (for the time) VGA cards.

hnarn 8y ago
> So I think that for computing the 0 with a slash extending outside the line predates the 0 with the slash entirely inside the line. For computing, sure. But the Danish letter pre-dates computers, likely by centuries, so the point still stands that an effort should be made to separate the two if at all possible. In your case it wasn't so much a choice as a result of technical limitations.

a_e_k 8y ago

In designing Luculent (shown in the original article at http://app.programmingfonts.org/#luculent http://app.programmingfonts.org/#luculent), my approach to was to use to reversed slash on the zero. It's somewhat unusual, but I did it precisely to avoid any ambiguity with the letter Ø that you point out. I could also have used a dot instead, but then that starts to look like an uppercase theta, Θ, at low resolutions. Squaring the zero a bit also helps.