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Comment by gilleain | Hacker News Reader

Oddly enough I used to write my '0' like an 'O', until I started writing down a lot of chemical structures with numbered atoms. I had to distinguish between the 0 label and the 'O' of an oxygen. I've now adopted the 0 as the way to do it :)

edit: Ok, so HN font as displayed does not show the bar across the 0, even though the editor does ...

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I’m not sure how good rendering support is, but you can try explicitly specifying in Unicode that you want a zero with a "combining long solidus overlay":

0̸

(May render as 0 ̸, but should look like a single slashed zero. Wikipedia seems to think this is the way to get a slashed zero in Unicode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashed_zero)

I also had to adapt my handwriting - halfway through my math degree, my inability to tell symbols apart genuinely started to become a problem. I ended up having to use a horizontal bar on 'z' to tell it apart from '2', and added a loop on the tail of my 'y's to keep them from looking like a wayward 'x', both of which persisted into my normal handwriting.

(And I still swear that my differential equations professor wrote problems that used mu, 'u', 'v', and nu at the same time as a prank on people with bad handwriting.)

I picked up the wild ass french numeral 1 from living there in my youth. I still think it's more ambiguous than the english variants but I had so much trouble with people misinterpreting mine I switched and have never been able to shake it.

If you look up examples online they seem fairly reasonable. But in actual daily handwriting they are very extreme. It looks more like a stylized capital A than a number honestly.

Oh I see, from looking at some examples it's the one without the bar on the bottom? I use the the more French/European '1' to distinguish from a lowercase 'l' (so that C1 does not look like Cl = chlorine).

Yeah the way I originally learned to do it is with no bottom bar and a short, 45º, straight serif. The french way has a lloooooong curving serif, at least as long as the downstroke. Or at least I think of it as french since that's where I ran into it. Maybe that's the norm in europe?

I (an American) picked up the European 1 and 7 in college but gave them up when I left school because they confuse people. I still use them when I'm doing math or doing anything where numbers and letters might be confused.

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