Make 'O' and '0' glyphs more easily distinguishable.
kruschk opened this issue · comments
The capital letter 'O' and the number '0' are nearly identical in both the proportional and the mono-spaced fonts. I think it would be a wonderful improvement to have a slash through the zero glyph to more easily distinguish the two. This change would also align with the font's primary goal of being "highly legible"!
I agree with this entirely, being an "aeronautical font" one would assume this font is designed for quick recognition between characters. Even at a larger font size the difference between "O" and "0" are much too similar and very much indistinguishable.
@LaurentSpaggiari We designed the two zeros having in mind the slash one to be used in alphanumerical sequences, and the normal one to be used in numerical sequences. You can find it in the ‘private use area’
There is an OpenType contextual feature for slashed zeroes. If slashed zero is setup properly as an OpenType typographic feature it can be enabled via font-variant-numeric: slashed-zero; in CSS, or by selecting it in the "advanced font features" section of a DTP program.
I just checked for this feature in b612 using Scribus and I don't see "slashed zero" as an advanced font feature. I'm not sure how to set this up in your font editor but in FontForge, this sort of thing is handled via contextual features.
The screen shot header on https://b612-font.com/ shows the zero with the slash. I love this font (and spent a lot of time building airline reservations systems for ITA Software) and want to use the Mono version as a programming font, but it is difficult to enable the zero slash. Perhaps the Mono version should have the slash enabled by default?
I also have concerns about billing this font as useful in safety-critical systems, since the 0/O problem is just the sort of thing that shows up in a post mortem. I think the safe default is a zero with a slash and suggest altering the font to have the zero with slash be the default.
I made a fork of the project that recreated the ttf mono fonts with the slashed zero as the standard one and that can be recognized as Mono fonts in Linux
https://github.com/ekaitz-zarraga/b612
can I help you with this Bug. Why don't you use a different case for "O"? If you want I can do it for the whole set of codes or better change the complete font style
I made a fork of the project that recreated the ttf mono fonts with the slashed zero as the standard one and that can be recognized as Mono fonts in Linux https://github.com/ekaitz-zarraga/b612
Excellent, I tried and appreciate font editors all the more. Confer #25 (comment)
I made a fork of the project that recreated the ttf mono fonts with the slashed zero as the standard one and that can be recognized as Mono fonts in Linux https://github.com/ekaitz-zarraga/b612
@ekaitz-zarraga could you also please help with ( ) : ; ' " ` characters..? It's much appreciated as the font is so good..
@anilkumar150886 i don't feel I need to replace those. I'm pretty happy with them. But feel free to make a fork of my project and work on it. You can use fontforge for that.
@LaurentSpaggiari It's maddening to think that you'd not only introduce, but then defend such a safety-critical design flaw.
Let's not have an Air Crash Investigation episode because the font designers decided to get stylistically creative (and inconsistent) with the number zero.
There should only be one instance of the number zero. The one that's universally recognised since the dawn of computing.
B612Mono-Regular-Tweaked.ttf from https://github.com/Firstyear/b612/tree/master/fonts/ttf now has fixed braces, period and others. It also has 0 with / by default as the numerical 0 in all the tweaked variants. Hope this helps!