Comment by vivid242

2 days ago

Thanks for the effort!

I'm always intrigued by the German FE-Schrift ("fälschungserschwerende Schrift", "more-difficult-to-forge font") chooses shapes for characters that makes it hard for them to be turned into one another (like a 3 into an 8 or so):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift

4 comments

vivid242

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Terr_  2 days ago

As a youth in the DOS era, I was always enamored of fonts like OCR-A, there is some overlap between the problems of "make it easy to distinguish" and "make it hard to maliciously corrupt", although I can imagine some cases where they might be in conflict, especially if adding ink is asymmetrically easier than removing or covering it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A

rob74  2 days ago

What I have always wondered about with FE-Schrift: they painstakingly made all glyphs distinguishable, but completely f'ed it up with V and Y: the "stalk" of the Y is vertical and so short that they're very easy to confuse. They could have made the "stalk" slanted, or even curved like in lowercase "g", and most people would have still recognized it as a "Y"...

  • wongarsu  2 days ago

    A slanted stalk might have made it too close to an X with a removed lower left arm. But a curved stalk does seem like it would have been an easy improvement