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Comment by malodyets | Hacker News Reader

Much good there but l and 1 are identical.

I'm really surprised this made it through, it's one of the handful of character sets that require distinct glyphs to prevent confusion/mixups.

Not quite, the 1's top serif extends to the left edge. https://postimg.cc/nXMt2qhx Still way too close for comfort.

To be fair, they did say it was inspired by typewriters, and most old typewriters don't have a '1', so you type a lowercase 'l' instead.

That are really old typewriters.

not really, in the sense that it would be a really old typewriter, there aren't any new typewriters. I'm not super old, and typewriters I used in high school did not have a one. Nobody had an IBM Selectric at home.

BTW on the same subject of fonts, you want to be able to distinguish between 1, l, and I which are not always distinguishable.

I just googled for some typewriter pictures and only really old typewriters didn't have a "1".

Actually, it was /most/ typewriters. Having a numeral one (1) key on a keyboard was something brought about by computer input keyboards (where there did, indeed, need to be a distinct numeral one separate from lower case-ell (l)).

But for most typewriters, the ell (l) key also served as the numeral one key.

Then don't call it "server". Call it "typewriter".

How did they type '2' on those old typewriters?

There was a "2" key, just no "1" key on some models.

I use proportional fonts for coding that don’t really distinguish between 1 and l, it doesn’t seem to matter in practice.

Yeah it's annoying in several fonts, not just that one. So I simply modify the font I'm using: one thing I do is I remove the lower left horizontal bar from lowercase 'l', that way it cannot be mistaken from a '1'.

Basically changing what's on the left to what's on the right:

    ***         ***
      *           *
      *           *
      *           *
    *****         ***

It's a little trick I've been using since so long I don't even remember since when I'm doing that.

> I simply modify the font I'm using

One of those minor nudges in life...

EDIT: and also a monospaced comment on hn to describe it :)

Do you use [ttx](https://fonttools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ttx.html) for this?

Love the zero, but agreed.

yeah ibm's courier has a horizontal top line for 'l' and a slanted top line for '1'

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