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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

For a body text font, there's no problem with lower L and upper i being ambiguous. When you're reading paragraphs of text, there's virtually always enough context that it's a non-issue.

Now, if you're displaying code or a password or similar that needs to be retyped, then yes they need to be differentiated, but that's not what a font like this is meant for -- that's what monospaced code fonts are for.

But no differentiation is needed for a proportional sans-serif font intended for regular written language. An uppercase i with crossbars above and below would be jarringly ugly for many sans-serif fonts, and similarly a hook at the top of a lowercase L may not fit the font's personality at all, depending on how other letterforms are designed. (And trying to differentiate the lowercase L with something more subtle, by making it a smidgen taller or angling the top, usually might as well be invisible at body text size.)

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It still comes up occasionally; just yesterday a customer was talking about the clID field of an XML file in an email, and it's kind of hard to see. For years I thought Douglas McIlroy was named "Mcllroy" (with two lower L's) and I wasn't quite sure how you should pronounce that, until I heard his name pronounced somewhere; "ohh, it's a capital i!"

Given how easy it is to prevent this kind of confusion, I don't really understand why you wouldn't want to at least provide a subtle hint and make either the I or l stand about just a little bit.

It's even worse when one assumes "I" are capital-i's to assuming they are lower-case ells and back.

"Ill-advised llama farm was Ian's folly."

There is no reason to omit the crossbars. Capital "i" has crossbars; every elementary-schooler knows this.

Why select a font with an ambiguous character in hopes that you'll never encounter a situation where it's unclear... and then face a dilemma when it is? Simply select a properly-designed font in the first place, and all use-cases will be served.

Elementary-schoolers write their lowercase a's as single-storey while typography nearly universally uses double-story. They write their lowercase g's as single-storey while fonts often use double-story. And they write their uppercase Q's using a tail that crosses the bowl, rather than one carefully underneath, as if often used in typography.

So I wouldn't rely on how elementary-schoolers write as a guide for typographic design.

In any case, there is a perfectly good reason to omit the crossbars, which is consistency. They are essentially serifs, and it's totally inconsistent to use serifs for just one out of 52 letterforms and not on the remaining 51.

Putting crossbars on an I is like a bar through a 7, a slash through a zero, or a bar through a Z. It's a hack for enhanced legibility but it's ugly. It's noisy. It's distracting. We do it in handwriting or in monospaced code fonts when required, but not for professional-looking body text. Sometimes the more aesthetically pleasing choice is the best one, which is something "proper design" takes into account.

Consistency is great, but why exactly is consistency helpful in this case?

Seems surprisingly defensive to not be in favor of a small change that eliminates an entire category of confusion and improves accessibility.

Fonts are for reading. Consistency in some formal aspect doesn't help that goal per se, because all letters are different and have to recognized as such quickly. Relying on context to disambiguate is a serious short-coming: it slows down reading, and causes possible errors. There's really no way to defend two letters being virtually identical.

Are they serifs? On serif fonts the bars themselves get serifs. They are more like the bar on capital G or the cross bar on capital A.

Yes, they are functionally serifs.

If they were "proper" bars that were an integral part of the letterform, then in a serif font there would be crossbars on the uppercase i that would then have ending serifs themselves, such as you find at the top of a T. But obviously those aren't there.

So yes, they function entirely as serifs, not like bars in other letters.

Those other examples are invalid because they do not distinguish between letters.

And no, the crossbars are not serifs, any more than the horizontal line of a capital G is a serif.

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