[HN Gopher] B612 Font Family
___________________________________________________________________
B612 Font Family
Author : OliverGilan
Score : 422 points
Date : 2023-09-15 02:33 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (b612-font.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (b612-font.com)
| brandonasuncion wrote:
| I really like the font aesthetically, and I'd use it as a coding
| font. However, the brackets and parentheses look too similar at
| smaller sizes, and arrows (ie. -> and =>) don't quite line up
| properly.
| tangwwwei wrote:
| i used it as a coding font for awhile then realized that i cant
| distinguish between comma and fullstop on my ide setup
| reacweb wrote:
| I always put a space after a comma. Never after a fullstop.
| Coding rules improve readability.
| Xunjin wrote:
| Every time that I pair with someone, they always get confused
| about it, after months you get adjusted, might be caused by the
| syntax when coding.
| chapterjason wrote:
| Pretty confusing, the banner image shows zeros with the dash to
| distinguish them from O's, in the example of the page there
| aren't any dashes.
| naillo wrote:
| I wonder when we'll consider fonts as a 'solved' problem. I keep
| seeing designers making more of them, I guess it's just a
| tradition and hobby at this point
| croisillon wrote:
| not so sure about that, my boss calls me a pedant when i write
| reports in cuneiform
| GhostWhisperer wrote:
| s/fonts/languages/
| rbanffy wrote:
| I was looking into the source and was very confused until I found
| the UFO glif files and the build.sh script. It looks like the
| proprietary FontLab format is the "source" and the UFO files are
| generated from that and TTF files generated from the VFDs are
| committed into the repo.
|
| BTW, I'm used to FontForge (which is not the most amenable to
| collaborative work) and would love to know what other font
| designers use and what would be a good collaborative workflow for
| open source fonts.
| futureduck wrote:
| Strange, the background image of the site's header shows a very
| nice cockpit font indeed, but the actual B612 font is quite
| different - for instance zeros have no line through them. Though
| the oxygen indicator seems to use this font.
| distantsounds wrote:
| It's really unfortunate that this glaring issue stops wide
| adoption. The slash through the zero should have been the
| default, very silly for the official release to omit that.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| It's very unfortunate that these glyphs are not available via
| OT features or font-variant in CSS. I assume the cockpit
| software uses glyphs directly instead of using OpenType.
|
| There are two open tickets about it, the second is almost four
| years old, maybe someone here who is familiar with the tooling
| could contribute?
|
| https://github.com/polarsys/b612/issues/24
|
| https://github.com/polarsys/b612/issues/20#issuecomment-5448...
| starkparker wrote:
| Even the font's designers were unable to contribute due to a
| lack of merge rights, since they weren't elected by the
| Eclipse foundation. https://github.com/polarsys/b612/issues/1
| 0#issuecomment-4719...
|
| The only user who's demonstrated merge rights on the repo is
| the repo's Eclipse Foundation project lead, Laurent
| Spaggiari: https://projects.eclipse.org/content/laurent-
| spaggiari-proje...
|
| Who's the only listed contributor on the repo: https://github
| .com/polarsys/b612/blob/master/CONTRIBUTORS.tx...
|
| And who's been publicly inactive on GitHub since the repo's
| last merge in March 2019: https://github.com/LaurentSpaggiari
| ?tab=overview&from=2019-0...
|
| I don't think any amount of tooling knowledge could
| facilitate a contribution at this point. It's a dead project.
| The best anyone could do is apply the steps in issue #24 to a
| fork and start promoting it.
| delfinom wrote:
| Good to see the Eclipse Foundation killed something, again,
| due to shear incompetence.
| livrem wrote:
| The image shows a 0 without a line as well. Maybe the other one
| is a O? Or maybe there are conventions to use slashed zeroes in
| some places an non-slashed in other places?
| reacweb wrote:
| Yes. 0 (not slashed) is ambiguous only in fields that accept
| also letters.
| atoav wrote:
| I think the goal of the designers wasn't to recreate the font
| in the plane, but to create their own inspired high legibility
| font.
| atoav wrote:
| (for those downvoting I think this, because this is what I
| remember to have read years ago when this font came out)
| [deleted]
| rmu09 wrote:
| It does include the slashed zero, just not at the zero glyph
| place.
| racingmars wrote:
| Yeah, that always bugged me! The zero-with-a-slash only seems
| to be used in that flight plan section of the screen; all of
| the other zeroes are without the slash. And the "5" and "4"
| next to the zero-with-a-slash in the waypoint 5240N is clearly
| the B612 glyphs. So it makes me think that in the Airbus
| software, in contexts where there might be ambiguity between 0
| and O or where there are mixed letters and numbers, they use
| the zero-with-a-slash, but everywhere else (numeric-only
| readouts, etc.) they use the non-slash zero.
|
| And I wonder if there's a 0-with-a-slash in the downloadable
| version of the font, enabled with an OpenType stylistic set
| number or feature or something, or if that zero-with-a-slash is
| just something custom the Airbus folks do internally.
| warrenm wrote:
| does it have to do with "knowing" whether the data being
| displayed is numeric vs alphanumeric?
|
| When alphanumeric, put the slash, when only numeric leave it
| out?
| Gare wrote:
| Checked the Github repository, there are indeed separate
| "zero" and "slashedzero" glyphs.
| zauguin wrote:
| While there is a glyph like that there's no nice way to
| access it. There is no font feature to enable slashedzero
| by default and slashedzero is not mapped to U+0030 U+FE00
| (Unicode's standard variant for an explicit slashed zero).
| Instead it's only accessible using the private use
| codepoint U+E007 and then typically doesn't get copied as a
| regular zero.
|
| But more generally the font has an empty GSUB table which
| would be used for such substitutions. I'm wondering if the
| cockpit display maybe misses support for that and that's
| why they tried not to use it for anything.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Still a worthy bug to be submitted.
| throw0101b wrote:
| * https://github.com/polarsys/b612/issues/20
| rbanffy wrote:
| The workflow to fix things doesn't seem clear - are
| people supposed to work on the .glif files?
| sebazzz wrote:
| > And I wonder if there's a 0-with-a-slash in the
| downloadable version of the font, enabled with an OpenType
| stylistic set number or feature or something, or if that
| zero-with-a-slash is just something custom the Airbus folks
| do internally.
|
| According to the Github issue mentioning in a sibling
| comment:
|
| > We designed the two zeros having in mind the slash one to
| be used in alphanumerical sequences, and the normal one to be
| used in numerical sequences. > > You can find it in the
| 'private use area'
| ho_schi wrote:
| I also miss a distinguished 0 (with a line through). With B612
| the O and 0 (with a line through) could be mixed up.
| tangwwwei wrote:
| previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18946601
| ohadron wrote:
| I couldn't find any evidence for this font having particularly
| good legibility (such as a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation
| (RSVP) test), but my hunch is that it's not that great.
|
| It was probably optimized for low-res screens and specifically
| for monospace usage.
|
| Kerning looks quite off in the Google fonts specimen
| (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/B612?query=b612)
| chaosprint wrote:
| It's very interesting that I picked this font for my live coding
| language: https://quaverseries.web.app/
|
| The main reason is that I need to use a syntax to represent a
| music sequencer such as ___65. B612 can separate two or more
| underscores perfectly.
|
| For a long time, it's always my first choice of coding font
| although I have no idea on its origin. I just feel it looks great
| when I browse all Google fonts. But it's great to know the story
| behind it, and thanks for sharing.
| tangwwwei wrote:
| it does look great on ur site!
| chaosprint wrote:
| Thanks! I realised later that it has an issue with
| parenthesis (). So I had to switch to Fira Code for
| https://glicol.org/
| dessimus wrote:
| Anyone else just learning about Universite de Toulouse III? Did
| the first one sink into the swamp, followed by the second one
| burning down, falling over, then sinking into the swamp?
| nazka wrote:
| As a French I like your description better.
| ernesth wrote:
| There are in fact 3 universities in Toulouse: Toulouse
| I-Capitole, Toulouse Jean Jaures (used to be Toulouse II-Le
| Mirail), and Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier. And since it would be
| absurd to have just those three universities they are part of a
| group called "Universite de Toulouse" (formerly Universite
| federale de Toulouse Midi-Pyrenees) which also counts a number
| of schools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_University_of_
| Toulouse....
| gyrodiot wrote:
| Ha! No, that's just the local naming since Toulouse has several
| of them, they have proper names in addition to the numbering.
| Toulouse I Capitole is (mostly) law and economics, Toulouse II
| Jean Jaures is (mostly) social sciences/humanities/linguistics
| and Toulouse III Paul Sabatier is (mostly) STEM.
|
| My alma mater is technically Universite de Toulouse, the
| federating entity that formally gives the diploma, but the
| existence of such entities depends on the city, each university
| has its own head and administration. My grad school lab was
| attached to Toulouse III.
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| I'm wondering if the image is real. Because there are slashed
| zeros and non-slashed on the same picture for some reason. Font
| seems to have non-slashed version.
|
| I would assume in cockpit it's better to always use slashed
| version to avoid confusion.
| racingmars wrote:
| Discussed in other comments... but the zero-with-slash is
| _only_ used in the flight plan section of that display; all of
| the other zeros are without the slash. It seems they only use
| the zero-with-slash where there might be a risk of ambiguity
| between 0 and O... everywhere else where it 's just numeric
| readouts, there's no slash because there's no risk of
| confusion, and I'm guessing they decided zero-with-slash is
| more visually ugly/less intuitive for quickly reading numbers
| than zero-without-slash.
| agmater wrote:
| > and I'm guessing they decided zero-with-slash is more
| visually ugly/less intuitive for quickly reading numbers than
| zero-without-slash.
|
| Yes, it can be confused with 8.
| ipython wrote:
| Or when I was in first grade and my teacher marked me down
| thinking I had written both a one and a zero. Never will
| forget that.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I'm surprised the zero isn't dotted or slashed for airplane
| cockpit applications
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Posted every so often. A more descriptive post title including
| something about aircraft cockpits or something would be useful.
|
| Bunch of previous discussion here from 2019:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18946601
| pavlov wrote:
| The kerning looks distractingly bad. It's easy to see in the word
| "complete".
|
| Short words like "in" and "all" end up looking like they've got
| completely different tracking, which in turn makes it harder to
| see word boundaries.
|
| Probably a high-DPI screen in a well-lit room is simply the wrong
| environment to judge this font though, since it's designed for
| low-DPI screens in a cockpit. But if you're planning to use it
| outside of that environment, do test against other options.
| Xunjin wrote:
| This font is so spectacular, for some reason unknown yet to me,
| numerous fonts give me headaches/"tired eyes" when I used it the
| first time was a blessing I could perceive the difference in a
| week. A shame that, depending on the application, they look
| hideous.
| zoidb wrote:
| Another font that has a similar aim is
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_Hyperlegible I find that
| it strikes a balance between aesthetics and legibility. Two
| differences I noticed immediately are the 0 and I characters
| which are much more difficult to distinguish with this font.
| dimal wrote:
| This looks much better than B612. B612 just looks... awkward.
| It has these weird little cut-out areas at the intersections of
| some of the lines. I don't get it. Makes it looks like it's
| awkwardly pasted together from disparate pieces.
| Pinus wrote:
| Those cut-outs look a bit like ink traps, though whether that
| actually makes any sense in a font unlikely to be used with
| actual ink, I do not know...
| nazka wrote:
| Thanks you for sharing, it's very interesting.
| bhtru wrote:
| Do you know of other fonts with the same goal as Atkinson
| Hyperlegible? It's gorgeous.
| warrenm wrote:
| That font _does_ look really nice!
|
| Also noticed the slash in the 0 runs top left to bottom right,
| rather than the far-more-common [in my experience] top right to
| bottom left
|
| Any idea why that decision was made?
| hnbad wrote:
| An obvious explanation would be that this helps distinguish
| it from oO (as in Danish and Norwegian), which is slashed
| from bottom left to top right. The Wikipedia article does
| demonstrate its legibility when blurred.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > which is slashed from bottom left to top right
|
| interesting way to describe this in that it is described in
| reverse order of how i've always seen it. my first thought
| is that's because it is also opposite of how i would draw
| it when writing by hand.
| warrenm wrote:
| yeah ... I thought about "top right to bottom left"
|
| because then you are comparing top to top
|
| instead, i kept it left to left :)
| nabla9 wrote:
| Thank you. I have been trying to find this font again but I
| didn't remember it's name. I had it maybe a year installed in
| my previous computer and I loved it. Really good for coding.
| dylan604 wrote:
| "Atkinson Hyperlegible is a freely available typeface built
| around a grotesque sans-serif core,..."
|
| So obviously my understanding of the definition of grotesque is
| not what's meant as its use in relation to fonts, but the
| definition in a font's use is just odd on why it is used in
| this manner.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grotesque_(Stephenson_Blake_ty...
| jna_sh wrote:
| Huge endorsement for Atkinson Hyperlegible from me. As someone
| with horrible and declining eyesight in multiple ways, it has
| improved my computing experience a lot.
|
| There's been a couple of attempts at making a monospace
| version, I currently use the one by Edward Shin in my editors
| and terminal https://github.com/Hylian/atkinson-monolegible
| tangwwwei wrote:
| thanks for sharing this monospace version, i've been using
| atkinson as my browser's sans-serif font
| userbinator wrote:
| Unfortunately the name has been collided into by several other,
| more popular and newer, things since its creation. However, 46610
| is still available as a font name.
| adastra22 wrote:
| B612 is from The Little Prince.
| eesmith wrote:
| "46610 Besixdouze ... is a bright background asteroid ..
| named after "B-612", home of The Little Prince. ... The title
| character lived on an asteroid named B-612, which is the
| number 46610 written in hexadecimal notation." -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/46610_B%C3%A9sixdouze
| stracer wrote:
| The best legible monotype font for computer screens I know of is
| M+ 1m regular.
|
| Example:
| https://www.dafontfree.net/data/41/m/94730/map/0-charmap-m-1...
| Aardwolf wrote:
| 0 and O look almost exactly the same in the font, is the
| distinction of these not important on flight screens?
| eviks wrote:
| Another research project needed to uncover such basics
| froh wrote:
| wouldn't you think the better UI choice is to simply avoid
| situations where you can confuse O and 0 (and l and 1 and I) ?
| deknuv wrote:
| For those who wish for a font family to have distinguishable
| capital "eye" from lowercase "ell", the following is a
| recommended test: how does the font render "Illegal1=O0"
| chrismorgan wrote:
| A question on tracking/letter-spacing.
|
| In my browser, I always use my own font choices (Firefox:
| Settings - Fonts - Advanced... - untick Allow pages to choose
| their own fonts, instead of your selections above), which makes
| me more sensitive to certain sorts of modifications: most
| significantly, I observe how unreasonably common it is for pages
| to change the whole document's letter-spacing, normally to a
| positive value. (My firm opinion: you should _absolutely never_
| do this as a global thing, no exceptions.) I'm not certain if it
| might make more sense with some fonts than others, but the main
| thing is that I _notice_ it.
|
| So then, with this font, the main thing that immediately stood
| out to me is how wide its tracking is, so that I'd almost feel
| justified in adding `letter-spacing: -0.03em` (except that the
| shapes and some kerning pairs don't work that way). Does it feel
| that way to others? And _is_ there some kind of general trend in
| the direction of adding more space between letters?
|
| (The font's bold face, on the other hand, feels a mite cramped
| when in proximity to the regular weight, since it uses the same
| metrics. Also certain pairs are kerned much more tightly so that
| they feel out of place to me, e.g. Vi, DG (especially in bold).
| And as for the parentheses, I had to check that no, they hadn't
| inserted a thin space inside the parentheses, the font really is
| just that weird.)
| jhanschoo wrote:
| Typesetting for labels as is the case with this font is
| probably more suitable for wide tracking for legibility than
| fonts for text.
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| Welp, it's a failure because the capital "i" does not have
| crossbars... making it indistinguishable from a lower-case L.
|
| Such a tiresome defect in one font after another.
| abrookewood wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's indistinguishable - the lower case L has a
| curved bottom.
| Eduard wrote:
| without having a comparison, the uppercase I (as in INDIA)
| can be confused with a 1 (as in one) or a lowercase l (as in
| LIMA)
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| But you don't know that unless they're both being displayed
| at the same time.
| racingmars wrote:
| It's not a failure if it meets its stated goals. It's not
| trying to be a programmer's font, a terminal font, etc. It's
| specifically only trying to be a font for cockpit displays. On
| that front, there isn't really a context where I and l would be
| ambiguous in context. The only place I can think of would be
| waypoint names, but those are always all caps, so I and L don't
| present any problem.
|
| On the other hand, putting crossbars on their I would make it
| much more visually similar to their 1 glyph. Mixing I and 1
| (again, in waypoint names, for example), is much more likely
| and the strong visual difference in I and 1 by _not_ having
| crossbars on the I seems like a better choice for the stated
| goals /applications of this font. ("...improve the display of
| information on the cockpit screens, in particular in terms of
| legibility and comfort of reading, and to optimize the overall
| homogeneity of the cockpit")
| Eduard wrote:
| > It's specifically only trying to be a font for cockpit
| displays. On that front, there isn't really a context where I
| and l would be ambiguous in context.
|
| So for example IATA and ICAO airport codes are not within the
| context of an airplane cockpit?
|
| And the visual difference between "laa" and "Iaa" doesn't
| matter?
|
| The first one is Lamar Municipal Airport, while the second
| one is Igarka Airport.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| In those cases, they always would be in caps.
|
| So you get LAA and IAA, which are indeed distinct in the
| typeface.
|
| Nevertheless they (and most other typefaces) should have
| avoided the ambiguity.
| [deleted]
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I tried out the monospace font for terminal use, but some of the
| punctuation characters have terrible spacing, including : and .,
| so things like abc::xyz
|
| and some_expression .method()
| .method();
|
| look awful.
| tangwwwei wrote:
| yes i ran into problem with distinguishing between ; and : as
| well on this monospace font. i'll say it was fun to try it and
| i used it for awhile but it isnt suitable for coding purposes.
| im much more happy now with a highly customizable font like
| Input[0] where i can make it as wide or as narrow as i like it
| to be and also customize the various characters
|
| [0]: https://input.djr.com/
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Maybe that's on purpose to discourage airplane pilots from
| coding their own JS scripts inside the plane.
| artursapek wrote:
| but it's Rust tho
| nxobject wrote:
| It looks like two of its design goals were to retain visual
| consistency at veyr low dot-pich screens, to maximize readability
| of long passages in uppercase, and to accomplish this all of a
| full complement of symbols as well.
|
| (https://intactile.com/projets/ameliorer-la-lisibilite-et-la-...)
| dmccarty wrote:
| Ahhh fonts, where everyone gets an opinion and they're all super
| important.
|
| If you're designing a font not just for legibility, but primarily
| for safety, then it seems _extremely_ important that each glyph
| is uniquely distinguishable from other glyphs. Although this font
| has different characters for 1 /I/l, at a quick glance an
| uppercase i could still be confused with a pipe (|), and 0 (zero)
| and O (capital o).[1] I'm sure there are more. So from that
| standpoint, this font fails for me for legibility/safety.
|
| Also a nitpick, but assuming Chrome is using 60pt B612 font for
| the title (../fonts/B612-Regular.woff), the "B/6/1" glyphs are
| hideously formed (that "1" _puke_ ) and make me doubt the rest of
| the character set.
|
| [1] e.g., the FAA has already addressed this with tail numbers:
| https://www.faa.gov/licenses_certificates/aircraft_certifica...
| wlonkly wrote:
| The font has a slashed 0 for use in alphanumerics and an open 0
| for use in numerics. There's discussion of it in other comments
| here.
|
| I imagine pipes aren't used beside uppercase I in cockpits.
|
| The odd serif on the 1 is to ensure it degrades correctly at
| low resolution.
|
| When you design for safety, you also have to ask "safety in
| what context". It's neat that they released the font with an
| open license, but they didn't design it for anything other than
| Airbus cockpits.
| devit wrote:
| Seems really bad to me.
|
| There's a lot of distracting glitches like the K and Q having
| small gaps where strokes come together, and even glyphs like the
| N, M, Y and Z have weird little gaps at the joints, the F and B
| have a bizarre overhang at the upper horizontal stroke, the 1 and
| 6 have a weird cut in their strokes.
|
| There are lots of weird confusing choices like the parenthesis
| being a round rect instead of a bow shape, the @ having a
| "complex a" inside, the 3 and 5 using a "cute" diagonal layout
| instead of the normal "rounded-and-rect layout".
|
| Seems horrible for something that should be as simple as
| possible. The default system UI fonts like DejaVu Sans, Segoe UI,
| Roboto, etc. are far better.
| nottheengineer wrote:
| It seems to me that those choices are made with low DPI in
| mind. Those cuts probably make sure that letters don't become
| blurry.
|
| I think I'll try this one on my 1080p monitor for a day and see
| how it goes.
| mdekkers wrote:
| Have to agree. There is a lot of wild stuff going on that is
| visually tiring and hampers readability
| cormullion wrote:
| I think these "ink traps" might be effective on low resolution
| displays. But yes, those parentheses indicate it's not a coding
| font.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Yeah, there's a visual example here of how it helps the 'e'
| stay legible at low res:
|
| https://intactile.com/projets/ameliorer-la-lisibilite-et-
| la-...
|
| Without that "pixel trap" (?) the intersection (there's
| probably a fancy typographic term for this) would look too
| bulky.
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(page generated 2023-09-15 23:01 UTC)