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Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

The London Underground Regular font struck me as quite peculiar when I encountered it on a trip a few years back. The decision to lower the baseline for uppercase letters is highly nonstandard – I’m not aware of any other Latin-based digital signage system in the world that does that.

I wonder if it was the result of a study that concluded visibility was slightly increased over a consistent baseline due to the extra pixel of height for caps. Whatever the reason, it certainly gives the signs a quirky character (no pun intended).

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I've always assumed it's a nod to the original underground signage which had offset capital letters (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/London_U...).

Was wondering the same thing. If you look at some of the station displays pictured, you can see that there‘s not much space between lines, so I assume this is to have space for descenders without clashing with the lines below (more like raising the baseline for non-capital letters).

Yep, see the screenshot with Epping on the display for example.

It makes the capitals stand out more and I imagine it could be helpful for visitors who may have trouble remembering long sequences of Latin characters and may pictorially memorize the capital letters instead.

I might be feeling particularly cynical but I don’t get the feeling these were based off any study.

Anyway, it works ok for most of the characters but it’s quite jarring for the Ki because it looks like the K descends into the i’s cell (though it doesn’t).

Britain has several commissioned fonts for public signage [1] [2] [etc], and generally has very high quality road and rail signage — in most cases both the design and the content.

I'd be surprised if these fonts were not based on a study, or developed as part of a study to find a particularly legible dot-matrix font.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_(typeface)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Alphabet

Edit: I think we need TfL document 1-312 "Automated audio and visual information in public areas of stations and trains", but I can't find it online. Only the newer standards using LCD displays:

TfL Digital display standards: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-digital-display-standards.pdf

London Underground Good Practice Guide: Onboard Electronic Signing: http://www.signdesignsociety.co.uk/images/Knowledgebase/TfL_...

I was speaking from personal experience with past industrial projects commissioned with lcd/led displays - albeit admittedly not with the British government as a client. Thanks for those links, I will have to study them!

I figured the result was dictated by the specific dimensions and display density of hardware that matched the brightness/environment/size/etc requirements they set forth.

I know the care that goes into finding fonts for standardized government use (road signs, national parks, etc) but imagined this particular set of circumstances was confined to the displays commissioned in that particular round of updates and decided by the contractor and the liaison officials.

I think it may just be because it looks less weird than only pushing up the characters with descenders, like in HD44780 LCDs.

it also greatly increases the visibility / contrast for ALL-CAPS which looks to be quite common in these signs. while allowing for the qgyj letters that descend one pixel below baseline

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