Context solves this ambiguity in texts recording a human language, but in computer or smartphone applications it is extremely frequent to not have a context that allows disambiguation.
Ambiguous characters may have been acceptable in typefaces designed before 1990, but they are certainly not acceptable for any more recent design, unless the typeface is designed for a very specific and limited purpose, e.g. for a single advertising poster, and they will never be used for rendering arbitrary texts.
To be fair the designer who created the font would probably agree that for use cases like passwords or serial numbers etc. you should use a different font. That's the nice thing about having different fonts around. You can choose which one you want to use.
Then they can also coalesce the digit 1 into uppercase i and lowercase L because who cares right it gotta look clean. And why bother deviating from the perfect circle? The future is lowercase o, also for zeroes. Heck, why do we have the letter J anyway? Couldn't we merge that with I? It's so rarely used, it sounds iust about the same, let's iust "keep it clean"
It's funny I thought out a post, wrote it in my head and then scrolled a bit further and read (where you wrote it). The only difference was I choose upper-case "G" and making it a "C" instead of "J" to "I". We can also make it match open paren as well.
But yeah this whole thing seems absurd of removing the distinguishing marks on things whose only purpose is to allow us to distinguish them.
While were at it N can become \ and M as well. D can become close paren. Q can become O.
And entire font of just vertical bar, horizontal bar, open paren, close paren, forward slash, backslash and a circle. Just think of how clean it would look...
adrian_b|2 months ago
Ambiguous characters may have been acceptable in typefaces designed before 1990, but they are certainly not acceptable for any more recent design, unless the typeface is designed for a very specific and limited purpose, e.g. for a single advertising poster, and they will never be used for rendering arbitrary texts.
Hupriene|2 months ago
lucb1e|2 months ago
I really can't imagine this is the thinking
BoiledCabbage|2 months ago
But yeah this whole thing seems absurd of removing the distinguishing marks on things whose only purpose is to allow us to distinguish them.
While were at it N can become \ and M as well. D can become close paren. Q can become O.
And entire font of just vertical bar, horizontal bar, open paren, close paren, forward slash, backslash and a circle. Just think of how clean it would look...
eviks|2 months ago