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.
I think serif fonts have been found to be harder to read.
My personal feeling is that sans serif is for screens, serif is 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.
The English language loves ambiguity. Look at all the words with multiple meanings yet spelled the same way, even though we haven’t exhausted all 3-letter word possibilities.
But despite our love for ambiguity, we have maintained the disctinction between I and l in print (and probably manuscript) for all of our history. It’s only since the invention of web and personal computers that we’ve introduced this ambiguity.
Sans-serif fonts predate the internet, but not by much. Their popularity started in the 1920s because they look “cleaner” and more modern. I tend to agree with this sentiment, I wouldn’t want to look at serif fonts all day long.
IlIlIlIlIl
I remember when typewriters often didn’t have a 1 key. You just used l (lowercase L) instead.
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 :)
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
Is that Roman numerals for 1?
Same shape, yeah, but it exists because it’s an IPA (phonetics) character. Unfortunately, it’s too short to function as a capital letter.
It could probably take the ring to Mordor though.
Inevitably.
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My god, it was about the oil, wasn’t it? It was about the oil all along!
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Your post kinda proves that it’s fine because within the context of the rest of the words, everyone could figure out what you were trying to say.
I don’t know, anytime I refer to the letter I, it seems pretty damn weird. Do I mean I or do I mean l?
As someone whose last name is uncommon and starts with an i and a vowel, no it is not. The number of times it gets mistaken for an L is ridiculous. Even when I present an ID with the name all in caps, people fuck it up all the time.
Who specifically would you say banned it from the internet?
Jim.
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.
Lol, they don’t get the joke.
This is No Stupid Questions, not Lemmy Shitpost
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?
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
Vast majority of webpages shouldn’t break, I’m saying that as a web programmer. I myself override fonts on a couple sites that I use regularly (namely Wikipedia). Where it might go wrong is in edge cases, e.g. small special snippets of text like captions for images, which can be designed to fit in limited space and use condensed fonts.
Not sure that browsers allow overriding all fonts on webpages (ever since sites specify specific fonts instead of just ‘serif’ and ‘sans-serif’), but there are likely extensions that can do that dynamically and forcefully. I do that via CSS in the Stylus extension, but that’s specific to particular sites and can’t work everywhere.
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.
this is what that looks like on this page.
.you can also use stylus (a browser addon) and a userstyle for all or specific domains.
and… firefox’s “reader mode”, if available for the page, also has a basic (serif, sans, mono) font choice.
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
Iller is Swedish for ferret.
I’m sorry.
probably because sans serif is literally a lack of features in typography design sense which was a shortsight in computer sense.
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.
