The best legible monotype font for computer screens I know of is M+ 1m regular.
Example: https://www.dafontfree.net/data/41/m/94730/map/0-charmap-m-1...
B612 Font Family
91–99 of 99 posts
Re: B612 Font Family
#92Ahhh fonts, where everyone gets an opinion and they're all super important. If you're designing a font not just for legibility, but primarily for safety, then it seems extremely important that each glyph is uniquely distinguishable from other glyphs. Although this font has different characters for 1/I/l, at a quick glance an uppercase i could still be confused with a pipe (|), and 0 (zero) and O (capital o).[1] I'm s…
The font has a slashed 0 for use in alphanumerics and an open 0 for use in numerics. There's discussion of it in other comments here.
I imagine pipes aren't used beside uppercase I in cockpits.
The odd serif on the 1 is to ensure it degrades correctly at low resolution.
When you design for safety, you also have to ask "safety in what context". It's neat that they released the font with an open license, but they didn't design it for anything other than Airbus cockpits.
Re: B612 Font Family
#93Re: B612 Font Family
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that always bugged me! The zero-with-a-slash only seems to be used in that flight plan section of the screen; all of the other zeroes are without the slash. And the "5" and "4" next to the zero-with-a-slash in the waypoint 5240N is clearly the B612 glyphs. So it makes me think that in the Airbus software, in contexts where there might be ambiguity between 0 and O or where there are mixed letters and numbers, th…
does it have to do with "knowing" whether the data being displayed is numeric vs alphanumeric? When alphanumeric, put the slash, when only numeric leave it out?
Can't wait for a font renderer to get this smart. Any day now...
Re: B612 Font Family
#950 and O look almost exactly the same in the font, is the distinction of these not important on flight screens?
wouldn't you think the better UI choice is to simply avoid situations where you can confuse O and 0 (and l and 1 and I) ?
No, I don't think that's a better choice at all, making two characters look the same is the worse choice, having to design something to avoid situations of two identically looking characters being together sounds much clunkier, than having the characters not look the same in the first place. Plus, airport codes, radio frequencies, airspace zones, GPS coordinates, etc... have numbers and letters.
Re: B612 Font Family
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's specifically only trying to be a font for cockpit displays. On that front, there isn't really a context where I and l would be ambiguous in context. So for example IATA and ICAO airport codes are not within the context of an airplane cockpit? And the visual difference between "laa" and "Iaa" doesn't matter? The first one is Lamar Municipal Airport, while the second one is Igarka Airport.
In those cases, they always would be in caps. So you get LAA and IAA, which are indeed distinct in the typeface. Nevertheless they (and most other typefaces) should have avoided the ambiguity.
you are having too much of good faith in always-perfect assumptions when it comes to life-critical systems. I hope you are not involved in developing or designing such systems.
Re: B612 Font Family
#97Another font that has a similar aim is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_Hyperlegible I find that it strikes a balance between aesthetics and legibility. Two differences I noticed immediately are the 0 and I characters which are much more difficult to distinguish with this font.
"Atkinson Hyperlegible is a freely available typeface built around a grotesque sans-serif core,..." So obviously my understanding of the definition of grotesque is not what's meant as its use in relation to fonts, but the definition in a font's use is just odd on why it is used in this manner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grotesque_(Stephenson_Blake_ty...
If you click through to the next page:
According to Monotype, the term "grotesque" originates from Italian: grottesco, meaning "belonging to the cave" due to their simple geometric appearance.[14] The term arose because of adverse comparisons that were drawn with the more ornate Modern Serif and Roman typefaces that were the norm at the time.Re: B612 Font Family
#98I wonder when we'll consider fonts as a 'solved' problem. I keep seeing designers making more of them, I guess it's just a tradition and hobby at this point
I don't know how to say this nicely but your mistake seems to be that you think font design exists to solve one single problem that requires or even can have one specific solution.
You might as well ask when we'll consider fashion as a 'solved' problem. Or art.
Re: B612 Font Family
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> which is slashed from bottom left to top right interesting way to describe this in that it is described in reverse order of how i've always seen it. my first thought is that's because it is also opposite of how i would draw it when writing by hand.
yeah ... I thought about "top right to bottom left" because then you are comparing top to top instead, i kept it left to left :)
I honestly don't know the stroke order Scandinavian kids are taught when learning an alphabet that contains the letter. I also don't know if it's consistent across languages.
Most strokes that start from a lifted position move from left to right (e.g. the crossbar of the lowercase t) and European languages are written left to right, so describing it as left-to-right seems more intuitive to me.