Archiv für den Monat: August 2016

Identical zero and oh glyphs

Zero vs. oh: Strategies of glyph differentiation

When characters look similar to one another, misreadings or even misunderstandings may result. In such cases, type designers often try to avoid glyphs looking completely identical. One example of a similarity that can get too close for comfort is between the digit ‘0’ (henceforth: zero) and the letter ‘O’ (oh). Differentiation strategies between lining zero and upper-case oh have been shown to be fairly uniform across typefaces: Zero is almost always narrower and often less tall than Oh. These and other strategies have been discussed in a 2013 article by Charles Bigelow. He focuses on lining figures in typewriter typefaces and only briefly mentions contemporary approaches to non-lining zero and lower-case oh – a pair that is also prone to confusion and seems to be treated with less uniformity in recent typefaces. Inspired by a tweet by Shiva Nallaperumal, I have compiled typical and not so typical ways of distinguishing non-lining zero from lower-case oh. My observations are mainly based on old-style roman text typefaces in the Typekit library; this sample is not representative of anything but the Typekit library itself, which, however, contains a bunch of well-known, widely used typefaces.

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