Comment 9 for bug 653672

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Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

OCR is, I think, a relatively minor reason to ensure distinctiveness of characters. More important is to make typos easy to find (for example, when typing URLs, code, or temporarily-revealed passwords), and to make phishing harder.

The Ubuntu font does extremely well at this without being distracting or ugly. The capital O is about 40% wider than the numeral 0; and the 1 (thanks to its hook), lower-case l (thanks to its tail), and capital I (thanks to its height) are highly distinct.

As David mentioned, going further than that could easily be distracting (for example, a dot in the 0 or a crossbar on the 7) or ugly (for example, a serif capital I in an otherwise-sans-serif font). Those would detract from Ubuntu's primary use as a beautiful UI font, and make much more sense in Ubuntu Mono.

Since there isn't a specific problem mentioned here, I'm marking this Incomplete. Please reopen if you identify a specific reproducible problem.