Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

> Calibri font has "I" and "l" the same, according to Wikipedia. A better font should avoid characters being too similar (such as "I" and "l" and "1").

Only when used in a context where they can be confused. This is a situation where HN is going to give bad advice. Programmers care deeply about that stuff (i.e. "100l" is a long-valued integer literal in C and not the number 1001). Most people tend not to, and there is a long tradition of fonts being a little ambiguous in that space.

But yes, don't use Calibri in your editor.

> Most people tend not to

Yeah because normal people never have to deal with alphanumeric strings...

No, because normal people can read "l00l" as a number just fine and don't actually care if the underlying encoding is different. AI won't care either. It's just us on-the-spectrum nerds with our archaic deterministic devices and brains trained on them that get wound up about it. Designing a font for normal readers is just fine.

> Yeah because normal people never have to deal with alphanumeric strings...

Natural language tends to have a high degree of disambiguating redundancy and is used to communicate between humans, who are good at making use of that. Programming languages have somewhat less of disambiguating redundancy (or in extreme cases almost none), and, most critically, are used to communicate with compilers and interpreters that have zero capacity to make use of it even when it is present.

This makes "letter looks like a digit that would rarely be used in a place where both make sense" a lot more of a problem for a font used with a programming language than a font used for a natural language.

> Most people tend not to

Except the whole rationale for going to Calibri in the first place was that it was supposedly more accessible due to being easier to OCR.

Legal language isn't very natural

That's the "diversity" they were talking about?? Fucks sake.

Legal language is natural language with particular domain-specific technical jargon; like other uses of natural language, it targets humans who are quite capable of resolving ambiguity via context and not compilers and interpreters that are utterly incapable of doing so.

Not that official State Department communication is mostly “legal language” as distinct from more general formal use of natural language to start with.

People named Al are having a field day with the recent AI boom.

El confusion is absolutely a problem for regular people.

It's not, although blind or highly vision impared people who use screen readers sometimes also have to rely on OCR when the document isn't properly formatted with text.

Using a sans serif font generally helps anyone with difficulty distinguishing letters so dyslexic, low vision, aging vision etc. individuals. It's not just for digital OCR.

It's not like the State Department would ever mention Kim Jong the Second in documents.

Nope, just Kim Jong one (in French).

> Using a sans serif font generally helps anyone with difficulty distinguishing letters so dyslexic, low vision, aging vision etc.

So far as I'm aware, there is very little actual evidence to support this oft-repeated claim. It all seems to lead back to this study of 46 individuals, the Results section of which smells of p-hacking.

https://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/go...

"Only when used in a context where they can be confused."

So what are you supposed to when you're typing along and suddenly you find yourself in such a context? Switch the font of that one occurrence? That document? Your whole publishing effort?

Capital "i"s without crossbars aren't capital "i"s. They're lower-case Ls. Any font that doesn't recognize this should be rejected.

Normal readers know that capital "i" has crossbars on it.

Why design an intentionally ambiguous font? There is only downside to it.

> Capital "i"s without crossbars aren't capital "i"s. They're lower-case Ls. Any font that doesn't recognize this should be rejected.

You have asserted this at least thrice in the past thirty minutes. What makes you feel so strongly about it? "Rejected" for what purpose? Do you understand that you've just trashed Helvetica, to take a famous example?

That yaa can gat ba wath ana waval dasn't maan that wa all shaald start wratang laka thas.

Yes, exactly this. Judging a document font based on how well it functions as a programming font is weird.

> Natural language

I said alphanumeric strings not natural language. Things like order codes, authentication codes, license numbers, etc.

What an odd question. I don't like degraded communication or stupidity. Is that enough justification?

Oh wait, I trashed hallowed Helvetica? The Lord's font? The font used on the tablets Moses carried down from Mount Sinai? OMG whatever shall I do.

Meanwhile, the question stands.

Alright, Lumpy Space Princess

This indeed. In the last couple of years, I've had to re-read a whole lot of sentences because I read it as the wrong Al/AI in my head at first.

The US Supreme Court uses Century or Century Schoolbook.