It helps if you draw a horizontal bar on the 7 but many don't, so you can never really be sure if a 7 is in fact a 1 with the serif or vice versa.
I.e. for a given number of IDs, how many characters are needed in the 53 versus 22 encoding (people who are not good at math might assume it is more than twice as many).
https://is.mediadelivery.fi/img/468/a93c32e08dae4768869a4bda...
No chance of confusion. This seems to have prompted some to add the serif to their 1 for stylistic reasons or whatever, since it's still distinguishable from 7 with a bar.
But then again people following older or newer conventions drop the bar from their 7:
https://is.mediadelivery.fi/img/468/46827e3320294f89b12a9338...
This makes a singular 1 with sloppily drawn serif hard to distinguish from a 7 without horizontal bar unless you can also see how the same person draws the other digit in their style.
See the last example in this image:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Ha...
Side note to OP and author, the Wikipedia page is pretty handy and has a lot of info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_handwriting_variation
It never gets confused with 1, but in America, people were confusing it with 9 (!!), so I had to stop writing it like that. Can't please everybody...
My handwriting has always been pretty sloppy. My 9s come out like your 7s when I don't close the loop properly (I start at the bottom).
People confuse my lowercase r's for n's all the time too for a similar reason. Either I loop a little too much or I drag down the overhang so it basically is an n.
But it did not mention the most similar-sounding pair "F" (Foxtrot) and "S" (Sierra), which are nearly indistinguishable.
While one could use the NATO/Aviation standard alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta...), unless you have a very specifically constrained customer base,it won't help much. Best to also avoid those combinations.
Definitely better to have a slightly longer ID_String and maximal ability to read and speak/hear the characters. It'll save FAR more time and aggravation.
The end-to-end transmission can get really bad when you combine several different filter stages, such as a speaker's mouth being injured or obscured, a narrow channel like telephone or radio, noise, and a listener's ear losing parts of the spectrum.
As the sound transmission gets worse, you can get more rhyming ambiguities. Effectively, the consonants are lost in a bad channel and only the vowels come through. In an American English accent, I think these are the groups corresponding to different vowel sounds: A/H/J/K, B/C/D/E/G/P/T/V/Z, I/Y, O, Q/U, F/L/M/N/S/X, R. "W" stands alone with multiple syllables.
Depending on the kind of transmission problem, these groups can start to split apart into smaller subgroups based on which of their sonic differences make it through to the listener.
My family name begins with a 'F' and, indeed, I can't count the number of times where people write a 'S' instead. I've got invoices with a 'S' instead of a 'F'!
so 'muricans mistook my German ones for sevens, all the time, and I had to force myself to write what looks like a pipe symbol vertical bar to me instead of my trusted one.
and to disambiguate, we cross the seven like a lower case eff or tee is crossed.
I'm English, and I can't honestly remember which country it was that I've lived in (I think France...) where there were a couple of numbers that even after living there for a year I still wasn't confident reading when hand-written on things like café menus. And I don't think I would have thought of that being a systemic issue rather than just blaming an individual's handwriting before I lived there, despite having taken over 100 trips to France before moving to live there for a year.
Here's a deep link to someone in Germany writing down what visually looks like "77.5 :7:7" but his narration says it's actually "11.5 :1:1"
But this thread reminds me of when I lived in Canada for a while (coming from France) and I did misread numbers very often, which was totally unexpected to me. Yes, 7s and 1s looks very different between Canada (and the US I guess) and France (and probably the rest of Europe).
I haven't had this problem with Belgium though I'm not surprised if the standard here had been chosen to be the same as in France.
I was just saying it was obvious to me and it even takes effort to see how they could be misinterpreted. But I know they can be.
I was born in Europe so I put a horizontal line midway through 7. But now I'm in Canada and nobody else does. It can be a really tiny angular difference between a 1 and a 7 for a lot of people! :)