l don’t undersand why we Iive in a worId where capital I and Iowercase l are allowed to Iook near identical. PeopIe are paid to design and seIect fonts and they have aII agreed on this Iudicrous convention.
Why has this happened? And is there anything I can do about it as an individuaI or as part of a coIIective?
I can’t even do thorn-master Sxan’s thing and insert a character code because U+026A, ɪ, is too damn small.
Il1 while similar they’re typed differently on this site tho (for us atleast)
IlIlIlIlIl
I remember when typewriters often didn’t have a 1 key. You just used l (lowercase L) instead.
No one’s gotten into the actual “why” that I’ve seen. This goes back to the early days of the internet, or even computers, really. In the ’80s and ’90s computer screens were much lower resolution than today. The finer details of traditional typefaces were often lost. There was a big push to simplify and optimize for the screen. This also impacted the early days of the web. I remember the advice for amateurs was to design your pages for small resolutions screens, windows that were only 800x600 or even 640x480, which would work on a standard definition TV.
I remember the defaults in web browsers in the late ’90s were often badly spaced Times New Roman. People would try to code better fonts when they could define them, but they were still largely in the mindset of using fonts optimized for low-resolution screens. Worse, in the early days there were no web fonts that could be imbedded in web pages, so you’d have to try to pick a font likely to be on your readers’ computers, which usually weren’t great.
Nowadays basically everyone’s devices have high-resolution screens, and we have embedded fonts, so we don’t have to live our lives that way. Still, that decades-old advice echoes through in modern designs. And there are a lot of bad free fonts out there, with people unwilling to pay for a font or put in the effort to find a good free one.
As for what you can do? You can’t force everyone to change, but you can be the change you want to see. Encourage people to learn about good typography, which is not just fonts! Make smarter choices in the written work you produce yourself to show others the way. And to get by for now, change the default fonts the devices you use if possible, or individual apps or web browsers. You can even install browser extensions like Stylus to replace a page’s style sheet with a different, better one.
If I knew how to do I’d share this to [email protected]
For the record, less philosophical problems are caused by picking a sans-serif font with a bend on the lowercase L, than that shape for I, where everyone thinks it’s a serif, because it sometimes is
It also creates fewer philosophical problems if you distinguish between countable and uncountable adjectives. Though, I suppose that’s a less philosophical point than you made.
Dude, we live in a world where people put an S on uncountable nouns like ‘mail’.
I totally respect your attempts to help people, but ya gotta temper your expectations. ;-)
And is there anything I can do about it…
You can choose a different font.
As you can see in the included screenshot, piefed includes a choice of fonts including one that includes I with serifs. Certainly many other apps do as well. Or you can force it at the browser level I would think.
I don’t want I with serifs. I want I with crossbars, and optionally serifs on those crossbars.
Monaco for the win.
Monaco for the win.
Rock on.
For me, after trying many fonts the winner for easiest accurate reading is Intel One Mono.
I kinda want that font just for the {}
I find it very nice for coding and shell
Nice. Ok. I’ll look into that for my various apps and what nots. But don’t most webpages serve you whatever font they want and it would be a trainwreck to force a font change when the page hasn’t been designed for it?
Basic website design is supposed to allow the user to set their own fonts and font sizes along with formatting based on screen size and orientation. Yes, a lot of pages are designed terribly and might break, but that is because they made a shitty website and not because you chose to use the internet the way it is supposed to work.
Changing out for a font that looks very similar to Ariel but with easier to differentiate capital I and lower case l should work fine.
You can set a specific font in your browser settings and force it to use that font on websites.
Most websites should at least support specifying a generic “serif” preference and then they pick a specific one, however you should also be able to force a local font via either browser options or extension
I never thought to do this, and tho I’m not on piefed at the moment I just changed my “theme” in lemmyworld to “dark vaporwave” to achieve the same result.
Lol, they don’t get the joke.
This is No Stupid Questions, not Lemmy Shitpost
I always wondered how we should distinguish between hating AI and hating Al because Al sucks.
You put Weird before Al and we know what you mean.
Weird Al is a superb human being
What if it’s Normal Al
“I’m super, thanks for asking”
So that we can be like
✋ Weird AI music
👉 Weird Al music 🪗Jokes aside, you’re right. Comics commonly use all-caps fonts that do make that difference.
He did a good job of enjoying the misunderstanding without being condescending. That’s so funny and also terrifying :)
I set Atkinson Hyperlegible as my system font, to solve this and other issues.
https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/
Here’s how your text renders for me in LibreWolf
Did you manually edit the font table to switch I and l around or is OP being fun today
OP was making a point that was largely only apparent if the font changed
I’ll keep it in mind. Looks like my Samsung tablet locks me to download fonts from their store and they’re not free. Fucking Samsung. And I can’t jailbreak it, either, I don’t think.
There’s exactly 4 default fonts available and the sample font text is “This font will look like this” so I don’t know if there is a properly shapped I or not.
Best I can do is ][
That’s how Apple marketed their second PC. Apple ][. Then I think the mid-gen upgrade was the Apple //e.
Also moz://a not too long ago
That was such an amazing style choice, any time I see it now I’m still sad they moved away from it
Hard agree. Some sans-serif fonts add a slight curve to the lowercase L, which seems like a no-brainer. But that’s just me.
Be glad you weren’t born a few hundred years ago.
Meh. That one is not too bad. It is actually distinguishable from an f when you know to look for a crossbar.
It’s ſometimes written with a half-croſsbar!
Maybe it’s time to bring it back.
It’s still in a way used in German in the ß, which is a combined long s and normal (short?) s.
or ſʒ
I think serif fonts have been found to be harder to read.
My personal feeling is that sans serif is better for screens, serif is better for print. I think I read something backing that up once but can’t be arsed to find it now.
For lower resolution screens, serifs would be harder to read and would end up much noisier. Serifs on print are thought to help guide the eye along the line of words to make easier reading. I imagine the reality is complex with a number of variables impacting the outcome, and there is no single answer (or maybe even a logical answer at all).
Who knew people adding little lines to their words nearly 3,000 years ago would have such an impact.
As others have said, sans-serif fonts tend to have this ambiguity, whereas serif fonts don’t. I agree it seems like rather a silly design choice, but switching fonts solves the issue. A lot of fonts also make 0 and O hard to tell apart.
I don’t get how its considered a serif but a, Q, J, and L aren’t.
Iller is Swedish for ferret.
I’m sorry.
