Slashed or dotted zero to differentiate from O

uswds / public-sans

A strong, neutral, principles-driven, open source typeface for text or display

https://public-sans.digital.gov/

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Slashed or dotted zero to differentiate from O #33

Open flipswitchingmonkey opened 5 years ago

flipswitchingmonkey commented 5 years ago

It'd be nice if the zero character could differ more from the O character: Ideally the numeric zero would be slashed or dotted, so as to clearly differ from the letter O. See e.g. https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode for an example.

thisisdano commented 5 years ago

I could see this being a good case for an alternate character — accessed with something like font-feature-settings: "zero"

otherjoel commented 5 years ago

Worth noting: Public Sans is a text/UI font, not a monospace or coding font. Most text/display typefaces don’t have slashed or dotted zeros.

Generally if you have ID numbers or other contexts where 0/O differentiation is important, you would use a different typeface for those elements.

The US Web Design System, of which Public Sans is a part, currently specifies Roboto Mono (which does have a slashed zero) for this purpose. See https://v2.designsystem.digital.gov/components/typography/

x448 commented 1 year ago

Inter is a very popular sans-serif font that provides alternate character for slashed-zero.

https://rsms.me/inter/#features/zero

Out of the dozen extra features offered by Inter, the optional slashed-zero is the only one that makes me regularly recommend Inter over Public Sans.

It's convenient and useful to differentiate between zero and capital O without having to switch to a monospaced font.