l don’t undersand why we Iive in a worId where capital I and Iowercase l are allowed to Iook near identical. PeopIe are paid to design and seIect fonts and they have aII agreed on this Iudicrous convention.
Why has this happened? And is there anything I can do about it as an individuaI or as part of a coIIective?
I can’t even do thorn-master Sxan’s thing and insert a character code because U+026A, ɪ, is too damn small.
No one’s gotten into the actual “why” that I’ve seen. This goes back to the early days of the internet, or even computers, really. In the ’80s and ’90s computer screens were much lower resolution than today. The finer details of traditional typefaces were often lost. There was a big push to simplify and optimize for the screen. This also impacted the early days of the web. I remember the advice for amateurs was to design your pages for small resolutions screens, windows that were only 800x600 or even 640x480, which would work on a standard definition TV.
I remember the defaults in web browsers in the late ’90s were often badly spaced Times New Roman. People would try to code better fonts when they could define them, but they were still largely in the mindset of using fonts optimized for low-resolution screens. Worse, in the early days there were no web fonts that could be imbedded in web pages, so you’d have to try to pick a font likely to be on your readers’ computers, which usually weren’t great.
Nowadays basically everyone’s devices have high-resolution screens, and we have embedded fonts, so we don’t have to live our lives that way. Still, that decades-old advice echoes through in modern designs. And there are a lot of bad free fonts out there, with people unwilling to pay for a font or put in the effort to find a good free one.
As for what you can do? You can’t force everyone to change, but you can be the change you want to see. Encourage people to learn about good typography, which is not just fonts! Make smarter choices in the written work you produce yourself to show others the way. And to get by for now, change the default fonts the devices you use if possible, or individual apps or web browsers. You can even install browser extensions like Stylus to replace a page’s style sheet with a different, better one.
For the record, less philosophical problems are caused by picking a sans-serif font with a bend on the lowercase L, than that shape for I, where everyone thinks it’s a serif, because it sometimes is
It also creates fewer philosophical problems if you distinguish between countable and uncountable adjectives. Though, I suppose that’s a less philosophical point than you made.
I always wondered how we should distinguish between hating AI and hating Al because Al sucks.
You put Weird before Al and we know what you mean.
Weird Al is a superb human being
What if it’s Normal Al
“I’m super, thanks for asking”
And is there anything I can do about it…
You can choose a different font.
As you can see in the included screenshot, piefed includes a choice of fonts including one that includes I with serifs. Certainly many other apps do as well. Or you can force it at the browser level I would think.
I don’t want I with serifs. I want I with crossbars, and optionally serifs on those crossbars.
Monaco for the win.
Monaco for the win.
Rock on.
For me, after trying many fonts the winner for easiest accurate reading is Intel One Mono.
I kinda want that font just for the {}
I find it very nice for coding and shell
Nice. Ok. I’ll look into that for my various apps and what nots. But don’t most webpages serve you whatever font they want and it would be a trainwreck to force a font change when the page hasn’t been designed for it?
Basic website design is supposed to allow the user to set their own fonts and font sizes along with formatting based on screen size and orientation. Yes, a lot of pages are designed terribly and might break, but that is because they made a shitty website and not because you chose to use the internet the way it is supposed to work.
Changing out for a font that looks very similar to Ariel but with easier to differentiate capital I and lower case l should work fine.
You can set a specific font in your browser settings and force it to use that font on websites.
Most websites should at least support specifying a generic “serif” preference and then they pick a specific one, however you should also be able to force a local font via either browser options or extension
I never thought to do this, and tho I’m not on piefed at the moment I just changed my “theme” in lemmyworld to “dark vaporwave” to achieve the same result.
Lol, they don’t get the joke.
This is No Stupid Questions, not Lemmy Shitpost
So that we can be like
✋ Weird AI music
👉 Weird Al music 🪗Jokes aside, you’re right. Comics commonly use all-caps fonts that do make that difference.
He did a good job of enjoying the misunderstanding without being condescending. That’s so funny and also terrifying :)
I set Atkinson Hyperlegible as my system font, to solve this and other issues.
https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/
Here’s how your text renders for me in LibreWolf
Did you manually edit the font table to switch I and l around or is OP being fun today
OP was making a point that was largely only apparent if the font changed
I’ll keep it in mind. Looks like my Samsung tablet locks me to download fonts from their store and they’re not free. Fucking Samsung. And I can’t jailbreak it, either, I don’t think.
There’s exactly 4 default fonts available and the sample font text is “This font will look like this” so I don’t know if there is a properly shapped I or not.
Best I can do is ][
That’s how Apple marketed their second PC. Apple ][. Then I think the mid-gen upgrade was the Apple //e.
Also moz://a not too long ago
That was such an amazing style choice, any time I see it now I’m still sad they moved away from it
Be glad you weren’t born a few hundred years ago.
Meh. That one is not too bad. It is actually distinguishable from an f when you know to look for a crossbar.
It’s ſometimes written with a half-croſsbar!
Maybe it’s time to bring it back.
It’s still in a way used in German in the ß, which is a combined long s and normal (short?) s.
Hard agree. Some sans-serif fonts add a slight curve to the lowercase L, which seems like a no-brainer. But that’s just me.
I think serif fonts have been found to be harder to read.
My personal feeling is that sans serif is better for screens, serif is better for print. I think I read something backing that up once but can’t be arsed to find it now.
For lower resolution screens, serifs would be harder to read and would end up much noisier. Serifs on print are thought to help guide the eye along the line of words to make easier reading. I imagine the reality is complex with a number of variables impacting the outcome, and there is no single answer (or maybe even a logical answer at all).
Who knew people adding little lines to their words nearly 3,000 years ago would have such an impact.
As others have said, sans-serif fonts tend to have this ambiguity, whereas serif fonts don’t. I agree it seems like rather a silly design choice, but switching fonts solves the issue. A lot of fonts also make 0 and O hard to tell apart.
I don’t get how its considered a serif but a, Q, J, and L aren’t.
Iller is Swedish for ferret.
I’m sorry.
Is that Roman numerals for 1?
Same shape, yeah, but it exists because it’s an IPA (phonetics) character. Unfortunately, it’s too short to function as a capital letter.
It could probably take the ring to Mordor though.
Inevitably.
Who specifically would you say banned it from the internet?
Jim.
I think it might be easier to use a serif font. Where are you trying to make this change? At the browser level? OS? Or somewhere else? You should be able to make that change, but the specific configuration will vary.
But even if I fix my computer to properly display I, nobody else will see it.
What other people see is their problem. Plenty of people don’t mind or prefer sans-serif. Ensuring your designs look the same on everyone’s machine has been a problem since the dawn of the Internet, and you aren’t going to solve it by replacing 'I’s with a special character. Worse still, if a user’s font don’t doesn’t include that character, they’ll end up with an ugly ‘�’ or something similar.
You need to decide where you lie on the control vs flexibility spectrum, because currently you want it both ways. You either make static images of text formatted exactly how you want (and adding alt text!!), or you let users view the text as they wish.
I find it really strange how you’ve been confronted with locked down text from Samsung, and your first instinct is to try to inflict that same thing on others.
I don’t understand your confusion. There are three actors: the author, the reader, and the OS (of the reader and the sender).
You are saying readers should have full control, without exactly justifying it.
I’m offering up a counter-proposal that the author should have full control (or at least control of the font).
We had this argument with Mark Twain’s use of n*. If authors intent theoretically matters about a word, why not a font? Though obviously a font is less consequential.
I’m not seriously arguing for author-determined fonts, though (see, again, MySpace), but it is worth considering in passing.
As far Samsung or Microsoft forcing a font on us as users, we can probably agree to be against that.
I’m not confused, I’m telling you you are misguided. As an author, you can suggest a font to use. We do this all the time when building web pages by defining styles for a page, but once it reaches a user’s browser it’s in their control.
If you want more control, you will need to pick a different medium. It sounds like pdf might be what you want?
Well, that’s kinda how it should be, right? People generally don’t have uniform preferences for anything
I imagine you wouldn’t be particularly pleased if someone else decided to go the other way and enforced you using a font where 1liI|!j all looked identical because they wanted that instead for some reason.
Similarly, serifed fonts are regarded as being more readable for most people (though this is apparently also increasingly up for debate), however some dyslexic or neuro-divergent people can apparently really struggle with them compared to alternatives.
I imagine you wouldn’t be particularly pleased if someone else decided to go the other way and enforced you using a font where 1liI|!j all looked identical because they wanted that instead for some reason.
You think this is a slam dunk argument, but, yeah, maybe I would be willing to put up with that if I could add serifs to my I’s. The internet is built on consent, no? If they want to force that distinction on me for what they write, I can choose to not read them or to block them.
Sort of by the by, there is a user that goes by IllIllI or somesuch. It is delightfully irritating.
The internet is built on consent
That’s kinda my point though, if someone wanted text to all look a certain way on their devices, someone choosing to work around that for whatever reason is doing so without consent, right? Blocking is a reactive act, rather than consent which is proactive.
If someone came into your house and painted all your walls vomit green because they like the colour better than whatever you’ve currently got, that’s not really just a consent issue is it?
If someone wanted text to all look a certain way on their devices, someone choosing to work around that for whatever reason is doing so without consent, right?
Yeah, that’s approaching the situation on my Samsung tablet. I have to buy fonts from them if I want to change them.
But I’m saying why is my right to present my words they way I want to present them not at all considered? I don’t consent to arial font. Maybe my words are best expressed in Times New Roman.
I know the answer is MySpace–giving people absolute freedom led to absolute chaos…
At the risk of creating a monster, if how your text looks is more important to you than the content itself, I guess you could render all your text to an image and share that. Though, I’d suspect you’d end up in quite a few blocklists because people generally prefer to have their own preferences rather than someone else’s on their own devices.
Regarding the Samsung tablet font situation, a few things:
Firstly why they are sold, commercial fonts kinda generally cost money, I won’t get into how Monotype is basically operating as a cartel, but foundries own the designs of fonts and they license them to operating systems at a cost. Apple and Microsoft bundle the cost of the licenses in with the price of their software/devices, Samsung decided to not do that and pass on the fee to the users that specifically wanted them. Not saying it’s good or anything, just explaining why.
Secondly, doesn’t Samsung offer some free? I’ve not used a Samsung device in years so I might be misremembering, it wasn’t an incredible selection, but there were a few fonts for each of the main typeface categories.
Finally, if there isn’t a current root exploit already for the device, it never used to be too long before someone figured it out. Once that’s possible it was always pretty trivial to add in custom font files IIRC. Have a dive on the XDA forums and see if anyone’s working on your device
I was playing with the idea of taking page from Sxan’s book and inserting the I from the title into my text, then people would be forced to deal with it, even though it would unfortunately wreck the flow because it’s not designed to replace a captial I.
I get why fonts can cost money, but Samsung doesn’t seem to let me install free fonts, which we can agree is BS.
Second, there might be free ones, but it would be tedious to determine which ones have the I I’m looking for… but it’s something i would only have to do once, I guess.
The exploits I’ve seen for the Tab A seem to work for older versions of the firmware, but not the current ones. Maybe if I were willing to mothball the tablet until they caught up, I could manage something, but Samsung forces updates otherwise.
