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History of the broken vertical bar, being the ¦ form of |
- WalterBright 7y agoI always hated the Windows product key font which you'd have to type in to register Windows. The B looked like 8 and the D looked like O. I'd have to break out a magnifying glass to figure it out. That font seems to be popular for serial numbers and any other use case where the user has to type in a series of characters. I call it the IH8USRS font.
- Dextro 7y agoIt's interesting that codes for the Nintendo eShop have certain similar looking characters blocked off even in the keyboard you use to input. That way there's no question even if it's a zero or the letter O for example.
- mannykannot 7y agoThanks for the neologism! Regardless of which font it is rendered in, it is clear from the context that the third character is the number 8 and not the letter B.
- userbinator 7y agoThe Windows product keys are encoded in base24 using the alphabet BCDFGHJKMPQRTVWXY2346789, no doubt chosen to avoid ambiguities (e.g. 5 and S, 1 and I, O and 0), but unfortunately the B and 8 confusion remains.
- marcosdumay 7y agoToo bad this was not written near the keys. Or, well, I don't know if it would be very useful to write there either. At least not on that font.
- sago 7y agoInteresting. I've not thought about this before, but it seems at first glance a rather inconsistent set. Resolved by removing both: O and 0; I and 1 and L (l); S and 5. Resolved by removing the letter: Z and 2; A and 4. Not resolved: B and 8; G and 6. I wonder if it was just a quick idea someone had, or if there is some research behind it.
- martin_a 7y agoWhy did they remove E? Can't easily be confused with 3, I think.
- kube-system 7y agoMaybe they removed the vowels so that a randomly generated key doesn’t have any unexpected words in it?
- phjesusthatguy3 7y agoI saw a custom license plate a few months ago that was A8C0EF6 which, if not reading carefully, looked just like ABCDEFG
- happytoexplain 7y agoGotta love how much this write-up refers to the serifs on the lowercase L, but is rendered in a font (on Windows at least) that entirely omits those serifs.
- salutonmundo 7y agoMost sans-serif fonts poorly distinguish between "I" and "l", I've found. (This led to my dad thinking that artificial intelligence was called "Al", as in "Albert".)
- roywiggins 7y agoMy fantasy company would promote their wonderful new Al method of doing X, where X is just done by some guy named Al.
- coding123 7y agoInvestor: OH wow is that a Neural Network you guys are building? You: Yeah, Al here is our resident Network engineer. Go ahead and ask him a question. Investor: So do you use any kind of drop-out or just as-is? Al: Yeah, we don't have too much packet-los- You: OK Moving along...
- andreareina 7y agoJust say you trained a bunch of neural nets. https://xkcd.com/2173/ https://xkcd.com/2173/
- hermitdev 7y agoThis is why I prefer a fixed width font when it can be ambiguous. They don't typically have the ambiguities between "l" (lower case "L") and "I" (upper case "i") or even the number "1", similarly between the letter "O" and number "0". Personally, when handwriting, I got in the habit of striking a hyphen through the number "7" to disambuate against a possible number "1". Likewise, I'd strike through the letter "Z" to disambiguate from the number "2", and a diagonal strike through the number "0" to differentiate from the letter "O". My handwriting is terrible, and it has saved me a lot of grief over the years, but especially in my engineering courses in college.
- Tomte 7y agoI never consciously realized, but I actually prefer the broken bar. No reason, just nostalgia, I suppose. I might hunt for a contemporary programming font that renders the pipe so.
- ncmncm 7y agoThe broken bar feels more like real programming. Excuse me, now I need to do some FontForge work.
- lstamour 7y agoI suddenly realized what made reading old Linux books feel so nostalgic - in at least one of the books I still have, the terminal commands were all printed using broken bars for pipe, etc. You really don’t see that nowadays, but I remember it from text-based browsing, horizontal nav bars often used bar/pipe characters to separate links, and still probably do in footers and dusty corners...
- taneq 7y agoIf you really want to feel oldschool, try writing crosses through your zeroes as well (to distinguish them from O's).
- Tomte 7y agoI do, when writing by hand (and only in the job), but I'm not feeling about the crossed 0 in a computer font the same way as about the broken pipe.
- reaperducer 7y agoOr even older school, use a capitol P for a question mark. Or if you were fancy, a P with a / through it.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoIs that a rudimentary typewriter thing?
- ncmncm 7y agoFor anybody who has used a Vt52, H19, or similar terminal, there is no mystery. Before we had bitmap graphics, we had fill-in forms with ASCII graphics. A vertical line made with solid bars looked uneven, but the gap in the bar was the same height as the gap between a bar and the one above or below it, so it made a pleasing vertical dashed line to match the horizontal lines of actual hyphens and equal signs. Nowadays, of course, if you want a line, you draw a line, so the gap no longer has a purpose.
- cpach 7y agoI don’t get it. Why did the line look uneven?
- throwaway2048 7y ago+-----+ +-----+ | | ¦ ¦ | | VS ¦ ¦ | | ¦ ¦ +-----+ +-----+ Your font rendering mileage may vary.
- dfeojm-zlib 7y agoOh, the days of the ASCII Code page 437 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Codepage-437.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Codepage...
- mixmastamyk 7y agoThat was in the 80s and had a large number of box drawing characters.
- kijin 7y agoUnicode still contains a large number of box drawing characters. Some are broken into three, or even four parts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_character
- cojxd 7y agoFrom the linked page in the blog of the late Michael Kaplan: >I'd go look for it but I don't want to move off this page. The dark days of not having browser tabs...
- PaulHoule 7y agoFunny, I was building a system that needed a way to namespace CSS classes (so I could suck in HTML from different sources and assemble it into one document) and I found that class names can contain most of the ISO-LATIN-1 characters and I chose to use the broken vertical bar to separate namespaces from short names because hardly anyone uses it.
- phaedrus 7y agoIn 2008-9 I had a Neo Freerunner, an early (Linux) smartphone. I also used | in my passwords. Some of the soft keyboards included only a ¦, in the | spot—indicating that the programmer/UI-designer believed them interchangeable. (That is, the character I got on a keyboard by pressing shift-backslash was | even though it was rendered as ¦ on the keyboard silkscreen, but on the smartphone it was ¦ on the key and in the typed text.) This made my log-ins fail in many contexts, and took some inspired thinking to figure out the problem. That was how I first learned the two are not just different glyphs for the same character.