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I don’t know anything about fonts. (Aside from irl routing…) Why do people use fonts with which you can’t tell I from l (and sometimes 1!)?
by artificialLimbs 5y ago
I don’t know anything about fonts. (Aside from irl routing…) Why do people use fonts with which you can’t tell I from l (and sometimes 1!)?
- freddie_mercury 5y agoBecause they're designed for use cases where that is never a problem.
- qbasic_forever 5y agoLook at the photos on the page to see actual usage in the real world--it's primarily on wooden trail markers in parks. You see them pointing the way and sometimes distance along a trail. You never see paragraphs of text or exposition.
- tenebrisalietum 5y agoWell for certain cultures 1 and I were literally the same. That same culture also I believe didn't have lower case. Some brief searching brings me to some articles that show Latin lowercase came from monks/scholars under early French King Charlemagne. I guess if you're a monk manually recopying texts, simpler forms are better, even if some forms look like other forms. And it's definitely simpler/quicker to rout out a single stroke for I rather than give it the top and bottom lines.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoIf chosen well, it doesn't matter because context clues usually will eliminate confusion. You're likely to know that the lake path isn't I.4 miles long and that there's no 1 in 'Ranger Station'. In cases where there likely is to be confusion, spelling numbers out can make the intention known. But of course not everyone is so careful. There was a computer magazine back in the 80s that used a typeface for program listings that used the exact same glyph for 1 and l, which often could not be determined which one was correct strictly by context. Those were frustrating to try to debug.