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Comment by eviks | Hacker News Reader

So how do I find fonts that have 0s with a dot in the middle?

> filters are now easier to reach and sectioned out meaningfully

"Technology" is not a meaningful section, and in general having section taking more space than its content of just a single item doesn't help

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Not saying this applies to your situation, but I'm always slightly amused when I hear tech-oriented people say "this font would be perfect for me except for this ONE deal breaker" (often but not always the problem of insufficient differentiation of 0 and O). It's pretty trivial to modify fonts! Just download FontForge, open the font file, navigate to the code point in question, and simple operations like adding a dot or bar is usually pretty easy to figure out.

I have some proportional fonts that are perfect for some use cases except that they don't display block characters correctly and/or their digit characters are not of uniform width, and I fixed that by copy pasting from the corresponding code points from monospace fonts.

Good point, though bugs can easily creep in with such simple edits: in your copy&paste monospaced digits example you lose the ability to have both monospaced and proportional digits via a stylistic flag (and those are useful: use monospaced in tables, use proportional digits in text)

Also it's many files, not just one (though hopefully variadic fonts will catch on), so unfortunately patching fonts is a bit more complicated :( (but if it's literally close to just one thing, that it could still be worth it)

Since you're allowed to add your own sample text, I always use something like this:

efficient, effluent eggs 3690 Il1 GQ To AV Va Yo

... which shows ligatures (if any), old-style numerals (if any), descenders, the zero in a code font, differentiation among similar-looking characters, and familiar kerning pairs (if any).

That's a poor workaround since many good fonts have alternative styles for such things, and these wouldn't show up

You could scroll through https://fonts.google.com/?preview.text=0&preview.text_type=c...

No you couldn't, a font can have different styles. That's what databases and querying them is designed for

This is a long-running a shortcoming of Google Fonts, and as much as this is a welcome UI upgrade, it unfortunately does nothing to address the paltry set of tags that have passed for a taxonomy since Google Fonts’ inception.

It’s a particular shame given what a truly rich typographic library Google Fonts has grown to be: transitional and oldstyle serifs, didones, humanist sans, geometric sans, grotesks, even frakturs… all of this is flattened into an MS Word-caliber set of classifications that still calls script display types “handwriting” fonts.

Same issue with finding fonts that have ligatures.

and just discovered another joke of a search from a search giant helping me "find what you’re looking for"

You can't find Source Code Pro with any of the 3 Decorative stroke flagged even though that's supposed to be an exhaustive list (serif, no serif, slab serif)

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