Avoid broken fonts

Posted Feb 23, 2005 8:45 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

Even in Latin, serif, fonts, we're still stuck with letter `O' vs. digit `0', and letter `l' vs. digit `1'.

Note I wrote "most of the problem", not "the entire problem"! Anyway, in the font I am now reading your message in (Times New Roman), letter `O' and digit `0' are clearly different. `l' and `1' could be confused, although there is some difference. Well, the font could be improved. I remember seeing old Telex machines where the font was specially designed to make `l' different, with a small hook at the bottom.

(Reminds me of my father's old mechanical typewriter that actually took advantage of the similarity of `l' and `1': there was no separate key for "one"!)

What is ``sans-serif'' in Hindi? Japanese?

I don't know. The concept probably makes no sense in scripts that belong to other cultures than Western European. However, there are different fonts being used for these scripts. Even not knowing Hindi or Japanese, I can sense the differences.

Some fonts for these languages are no doubt less prone to homographs than others, so a similar solution is likely to be applicable: Pick fonts where the characters are maximally different for applications where URLs are entered or displayed for the user's verification.