 In 1974, ANSI published the Standard character set for handprinting (ANSI X3.45-1974). It proposed a uniform method of #handwriting acceptable to optical character recognition technology of the day. It included only upper case letters. It had some quirks: letter O has a tail at the top, like Q rotated 90 degrees. S has a little tail at the bottom left. U has a square base. Z has a full-width bar at mid level. I wonder if anyone ever used it? 55 comments
@luigirenna the whole "modified zero" history thing in computers / radio communications is real fight-starting material to certain nerds I know. For some people, the slashed zero is a commercial/telegraphic zero and has no place in programming. I write my zZ with a bar at mid-level to distinguish them from my handwritten 2 I also add a bar on top of my lower case u to distinguish them from my upper case U @theAeon ū is the long U sound in the Hepburn romanization system of Japanese, incidentally. @theAeon it's quite important. English speakers tend to make Japanese vowel sounds too long. Many LOL-worthy moments arise, such as the word for "supervisor" apparently being one short vowel sound away from the word for a considered-rude part of the anatomy  @scruss out of curiosity for a beginner Japanese learner what are these two easily confused words? @http_error_418 it's something like 黄門 vs 肛門, but I only got this secondhand from a learner @riley I can still write in Graffitti , but yes, it was a compromise. I guess the reverse trend were fonts like Data70 and Westminster that mimicked the look of MICR, but weren't. In other bizarre standards of typography, it seems that the original Adrian Frutiger tracings of OCR-B were accidentally thrown out at the standards agency that held them. OCR-B is required for use on passports, so it's kinda important  @scruss FWIW, I'd still prefer Graffiti to the newfangled fancy handwriting recognition systems. Even though both Android and iOS have gotten pretty good at it. As usual a measure overtaken by technology faster than expected. CGK/Siemens had by ~1977/78 perfected OCR of single letter handwriting in Forms good enough to process cheques and alike at very high speed (fast enough that a dedicated real mode mainframe was needed to record the data). By 1980 small scale systems build on a network of 8085 could do the same as desk size units.  @chort makes a change from Data70, Westminster and Amelia (the Moon Boot / Yellow Submarine font), then  When writing by hand, I cross my z's and 7's, to the annoyance of many, I'm sure. @scruss It's uncanny enough that it feels like a fantastic choice for some sort of scifi application. Might keep this in mind for some art/comics...  One would think they would have put a slash through the number zero, instead of making letter oh a backwards Q @nyrath they were probably only digitizing on a 3x3 or 3x4 matrix per character. They might have hit false positives between slashed-0 and / If you do take a look @ ### Nerd Fonts - Iconic font aggregator, glyphs/icons collection, & fonts patcher > Nerd Fonts patches developer targeted fonts with a high number of glyphs (icons). Specifically to add a high number of extra glyphs from popular ‘iconic fonts’ such as Font Awesome, Devicons, Octicons, and others. @AzureCerulean my fonts don't have many glyphs because if it's not in FORTRAN-66, I don't need it @AzureCerulean thanks for the links! I also had a Datamation article about it, but can't find the link. It used the then-briefly-in-vogue term "alphameric" as a contraction for "alphanumeric". @scruss@xoxo.zone god i wish there was an actual standard for latin-script typography  @scruss @simonzerafa putting a line on the capital O instead of a slash through the number 0 was a wild disambiguation choice  Indeed. Wouldn't be my choice. I specifically used fonts with slashed 0's (Zeros) not dotted or other weird changes 🫤🤷♂️ @simonzerafa @ferrix as I said earlier, they were likely only digitizing on a 3x3 or 3x4 matrix per character, so uniqueness was important @Bfury @penaddict this was likely mostly a US committee, where they don't do that sort of thing  @scruss This feels very similar to the old OCR-A typeface that cash registers used to scan before barcodes were a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A Interesting,no slashed zero - which was commonly told over here - would have avoided that strange O. Also the horizontal bared Z is as well standard. Last but not least the 7 being as well bared. helps to distinguish from ones and slopy I and T.  @scruss I would confuse 0 and O nonstop. I am used to a strike through with a zero and the tail at the O would be interpreted as such. |
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@scruss I find it interesting they went for the O like that instead of slashed zero to differentiate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashed_zero