B612 Font Family

[futureduck]

Strange, the background image of the site's header shows a very nice cockpit font indeed, but the actual B612 font is quite different - for instance zeros have no line through them. Though the oxygen indicator seems to use this font.

[racingmars]

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, they use the zero-with-a-slash, but everywhere else (numeric-only readouts, etc.) they use the non-slash zero.

And I wonder if there's a 0-with-a-slash in the downloadable version of the font, enabled with an OpenType stylistic set number or feature or something, or if that zero-with-a-slash is just something custom the Airbus folks do internally.

[ricardobeat]

It’s very unfortunate that these glyphs are not available via OT features or font-variant in CSS. I assume the cockpit software uses glyphs directly instead of using OpenType.

There are two open tickets about it, the second is almost four years old, maybe someone here who is familiar with the tooling could contribute?

https://github.com/polarsys/b612/issues/24

https://github.com/polarsys/b612/issues/20#issuecomment-5448...

[distantsounds]

It's really unfortunate that this glaring issue stops wide adoption. The slash through the zero should have been the default, very silly for the official release to omit that.

[livrem]

The image shows a 0 without a line as well. Maybe the other one is a Ø? Or maybe there are conventions to use slashed zeroes in some places an non-slashed in other places?

[rmu09]

It does include the slashed zero, just not at the zero glyph place.

[ho_schi]

I also miss a distinguished 0 (with a line through). With B612 the O and 0 (with a line through) could be mixed up.

[atoav]

I think the goal of the designers wasn't to recreate the font in the plane, but to create their own inspired high legibility font.

[zoidb]

Another 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.

[jna_sh]

Huge endorsement for Atkinson Hyperlegible from me. As someone with horrible and declining eyesight in multiple ways, it has improved my computing experience a lot.

There’s been a couple of attempts at making a monospace version, I currently use the one by Edward Shin in my editors and terminal https://github.com/Hylian/atkinson-monolegible

[dylan604]

"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...

[warrenm]

That font does look really nice!

Also noticed the slash in the 0 runs top left to bottom right, rather than the far-more-common [in my experience] top right to bottom left

Any idea why that decision was made?

[dimal]

This looks much better than B612. B612 just looks... awkward. It has these weird little cut-out areas at the intersections of some of the lines. I don't get it. Makes it looks like it's awkwardly pasted together from disparate pieces.

[nabla9]

Thank you. I have been trying to find this font again but I didn't remember it's name. I had it maybe a year installed in my previous computer and I loved it. Really good for coding.

[bhtru]

Do you know of other fonts with the same goal as Atkinson Hyperlegible? It's gorgeous.

[nazka]

Thanks you for sharing, it's very interesting.

[nxobject]

It looks like two of its design goals were to retain visual consistency at veyr low dot-pich screens, to maximize readability of long passages in uppercase, and to accomplish this all of a full complement of symbols as well.

(https://intactile.com/projets/ameliorer-la-lisibilite-et-la-...)

[pavlov]

The kerning looks distractingly bad. It’s easy to see in the word “complete”.

Short words like “in” and “all” end up looking like they’ve got completely different tracking, which in turn makes it harder to see word boundaries.

Probably a high-DPI screen in a well-lit room is simply the wrong environment to judge this font though, since it’s designed for low-DPI screens in a cockpit. But if you’re planning to use it outside of that environment, do test against other options.

[dmccarty]

Ahhh 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 sure there are more. So from that standpoint, this font fails for me for legibility/safety.

Also a nitpick, but assuming Chrome is using 60pt B612 font for the title (../fonts/B612-Regular.woff), the "B/6/1" glyphs are hideously formed (that "1" puke) and make me doubt the rest of the character set.

[1] e.g., the FAA has already addressed this with tail numbers: https://www.faa.gov/licenses_certificates/aircraft_certifica...

[wlonkly]

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.

[ohadron]

I couldn't find any evidence for this font having particularly good legibility (such as a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) test), but my hunch is that it's not that great.

It was probably optimized for low-res screens and specifically for monospace usage.

Kerning looks quite off in the Google fonts specimen (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/B612?query=b612)

[ChrisArchitect]

Posted every so often. A more descriptive post title including something about aircraft cockpits or something would be useful.

Bunch of previous discussion here from 2019:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18946601

[chaosprint]

It's very interesting that I picked this font for my live coding language: https://quaverseries.web.app/

The main reason is that I need to use a syntax to represent a music sequencer such as ___65. B612 can separate two or more underscores perfectly.

For a long time, it's always my first choice of coding font although I have no idea on its origin. I just feel it looks great when I browse all Google fonts. But it's great to know the story behind it, and thanks for sharing.

[tangwwwei]

it does look great on ur site!

[chrismorgan]

A question on tracking/letter-spacing.

In my browser, I always use my own font choices (Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced… → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above), which makes me more sensitive to certain sorts of modifications: most significantly, I observe how unreasonably common it is for pages to change the whole document’s letter-spacing, normally to a positive value. (My firm opinion: you should absolutely never do this as a global thing, no exceptions.) I’m not certain if it might make more sense with some fonts than others, but the main thing is that I notice it.

So then, with this font, the main thing that immediately stood out to me is how wide its tracking is, so that I’d almost feel justified in adding `letter-spacing: -0.03em` (except that the shapes and some kerning pairs don’t work that way). Does it feel that way to others? And is there some kind of general trend in the direction of adding more space between letters?

(The font’s bold face, on the other hand, feels a mite cramped when in proximity to the regular weight, since it uses the same metrics. Also certain pairs are kerned much more tightly so that they feel out of place to me, e.g. Vi, DG (especially in bold). And as for the parentheses, I had to check that no, they hadn’t inserted a thin space inside the parentheses, the font really is just that weird.)

[jhanschoo]

Typesetting for labels as is the case with this font is probably more suitable for wide tracking for legibility than fonts for text.

[dessimus]

Anyone else just learning about Université de Toulouse III? Did the first one sink into the swamp, followed by the second one burning down, falling over, then sinking into the swamp?

[gyrodiot]

Ha! No, that's just the local naming since Toulouse has several of them, they have proper names in addition to the numbering. Toulouse I Capitole is (mostly) law and economics, Toulouse II Jean Jaurès is (mostly) social sciences/humanities/linguistics and Toulouse III Paul Sabatier is (mostly) STEM.

My alma mater is technically Université de Toulouse, the federating entity that formally gives the diploma, but the existence of such entities depends on the city, each university has its own head and administration. My grad school lab was attached to Toulouse III.

[ernesth]

There are in fact 3 universities in Toulouse: Toulouse I-Capitole, Toulouse Jean Jaurès (used to be Toulouse II-Le Mirail), and Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier. And since it would be absurd to have just those three universities they are part of a group called "Université de Toulouse" (formerly Université fédérale de Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées) which also counts a number of schools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_University_of_Toulouse....

[nazka]

As a French I like your description better.

[brandonasuncion]

I really like the font aesthetically, and I'd use it as a coding font. However, the brackets and parentheses look too similar at smaller sizes, and arrows (ie. -> and =>) don't quite line up properly.

[Xunjin]

Every time that I pair with someone, they always get confused about it, after months you get adjusted, might be caused by the syntax when coding.

[tangwwwei]

i used it as a coding font for awhile then realized that i cant distinguish between comma and fullstop on my ide setup

[ShadowBanThis01]

Welp, it's a failure because the capital "i" does not have crossbars... making it indistinguishable from a lower-case L.

Such a tiresome defect in one font after another.

[racingmars]

It's not a failure if it meets its stated goals. It's not trying to be a programmer's font, a terminal font, etc. 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. The only place I can think of would be waypoint names, but those are always all caps, so I and L don't present any problem.

On the other hand, putting crossbars on their I would make it much more visually similar to their 1 glyph. Mixing I and 1 (again, in waypoint names, for example), is much more likely and the strong visual difference in I and 1 by not having crossbars on the I seems like a better choice for the stated goals/applications of this font. ("...improve the display of information on the cockpit screens, in particular in terms of legibility and comfort of reading, and to optimize the overall homogeneity of the cockpit")

[abrookewood]

I wouldn't say it's indistinguishable - the lower case L has a curved bottom.

[JoshTriplett]

I tried out the monospace font for terminal use, but some of the punctuation characters have terrible spacing, including : and ., so things like

    abc::xyz

and

    some_expression
        .method()
        .method();

look awful.

[PedroBatista]

Maybe that's on purpose to discourage airplane pilots from coding their own JS scripts inside the plane.

[tangwwwei]

yes i ran into problem with distinguishing between ; and : as well on this monospace font. i'll say it was fun to try it and i used it for awhile but it isnt suitable for coding purposes. im much more happy now with a highly customizable font like Input[0] where i can make it as wide or as narrow as i like it to be and also customize the various characters

[0]: https://input.djr.com/

[RomanPushkin]

I'm wondering if the image is real. Because there are slashed zeros and non-slashed on the same picture for some reason. Font seems to have non-slashed version.

I would assume in cockpit it's better to always use slashed version to avoid confusion.

[racingmars]

Discussed in other comments... but the zero-with-slash is only used in the flight plan section of that display; all of the other zeros are without the slash. It seems they only use the zero-with-slash where there might be a risk of ambiguity between 0 and O... everywhere else where it's just numeric readouts, there's no slash because there's no risk of confusion, and I'm guessing they decided zero-with-slash is more visually ugly/less intuitive for quickly reading numbers than zero-without-slash.

[Aardwolf]

0 and O look almost exactly the same in the font, is the distinction of these not important on flight screens?

[eviks]

Another research project needed to uncover such basics

[froh]

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) ?

[Xunjin]

This font is so spectacular, for some reason unknown yet to me, numerous fonts give me headaches/“tired eyes” when I used it the first time was a blessing I could perceive the difference in a week. A shame that, depending on the application, they look hideous.

[devit]

Seems really bad to me.

There's a lot of distracting glitches like the K and Q having small gaps where strokes come together, and even glyphs like the N, M, Y and Z have weird little gaps at the joints, the F and B have a bizarre overhang at the upper horizontal stroke, the 1 and 6 have a weird cut in their strokes.

There are lots of weird confusing choices like the parenthesis being a round rect instead of a bow shape, the @ having a "complex a" inside, the 3 and 5 using a "cute" diagonal layout instead of the normal "rounded-and-rect layout".

Seems horrible for something that should be as simple as possible. The default system UI fonts like DejaVu Sans, Segoe UI, Roboto, etc. are far better.

[nottheengineer]

It seems to me that those choices are made with low DPI in mind. Those cuts probably make sure that letters don't become blurry.

I think I'll try this one on my 1080p monitor for a day and see how it goes.

[mdekkers]

Have to agree. There is a lot of wild stuff going on that is visually tiring and hampers readability

[cormullion]

I think these “ink traps” might be effective on low resolution displays. But yes, those parentheses indicate it’s not a coding font.

[deknuv]

For those who wish for a font family to have distinguishable capital "eye" from lowercase "ell", the following is a recommended test: how does the font render "Illegal1=O0"

[rbanffy]

I was looking into the source and was very confused until I found the UFO glif files and the build.sh script. It looks like the proprietary FontLab format is the "source" and the UFO files are generated from that and TTF files generated from the VFDs are committed into the repo.

BTW, I'm used to FontForge (which is not the most amenable to collaborative work) and would love to know what other font designers use and what would be a good collaborative workflow for open source fonts.

[userbinator]

Unfortunately the name has been collided into by several other, more popular and newer, things since its creation. However, 46610 is still available as a font name.

[adastra22]

B612 is from The Little Prince.

[chapterjason]

Pretty confusing, the banner image shows zeros with the dash to distinguish them from O's, in the example of the page there aren't any dashes.

[tangwwwei]

previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18946601

[stracer]

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...

[fortran77]

I’m surprised the zero isn’t dotted or slashed for airplane cockpit applications

[naillo]

I 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

[hnbad]

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.

[croisillon]

not so sure about that, my boss calls me a pedant when i write reports in cuneiform

[GhostWhisperer]

s/fonts/languages/