
History of the broken vertical bar, being the ¦ form of | - lelf
https://www.reddit.com/r/typography/comments/aqcesg/history_of_the_broken_vertical_bar_being_the_form/
======
ncmncm
For anybody who has used a Vt52, H19, or similar terminal, there is no
mystery. Before we had bitmap graphics, we had fill-in forms with ASCII
graphics. A vertical line made with solid bars looked uneven, but the gap in
the bar was the same height as the gap between a bar and the one above or
below it, so it made a pleasing vertical dashed line to match the horizontal
lines of actual hyphens and equal signs.

Nowadays, of course, if you want a line, you draw a line, so the gap no longer
has a purpose.

~~~
cpach
I don’t get it. Why did the line look uneven?

~~~
throwaway2048

        +-----+      +-----+
        |     |      ¦     ¦
        |     |  VS  ¦     ¦
        |     |      ¦     ¦
        +-----+      +-----+
    

Your font rendering mileage may vary.

~~~
dfeojm-zlib
Oh, the days of the ASCII Code page 437

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Codepage...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Codepage-437.png)

~~~
mixmastamyk
That was in the 80s and had a large number of box drawing characters.

~~~
cschmidt
There is a proposal to add some of the old missing box drawing characters to
Unicode, in a section called "Graphics for Legacy Computing":

[http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17435r-terminals-
prop.pdf](http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17435r-terminals-prop.pdf)

They have been implemented recently in the Pragmata Pro font I use, which
seems to just keep adding glyphs

[https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/](https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/)

------
WalterBright
I always hated the Windows product key font which you'd have to type in to
register Windows. The B looked like 8 and the D looked like O.

I'd have to break out a magnifying glass to figure it out.

That font seems to be popular for serial numbers and any other use case where
the user has to type in a series of characters.

I call it the IH8USRS font.

~~~
userbinator
The Windows product keys are encoded in base24 using the alphabet
BCDFGHJKMPQRTVWXY2346789, no doubt chosen to avoid ambiguities (e.g. 5 and S,
1 and I, O and 0), but unfortunately the B and 8 confusion remains.

~~~
sago
Interesting. I've not thought about this before, but it seems at first glance
a rather inconsistent set.

Resolved by removing both: O and 0; I and 1 and L (l); S and 5.

Resolved by removing the letter: Z and 2; A and 4.

Not resolved: B and 8; G and 6.

I wonder if it was just a quick idea someone had, or if there is some research
behind it.

~~~
martin_a
Why did they remove E? Can't easily be confused with 3, I think.

~~~
kube-system
Maybe they removed the vowels so that a randomly generated key doesn’t have
any unexpected words in it?

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happytoexplain
Gotta love how much this write-up refers to the serifs on the lowercase L, but
is rendered in a font (on Windows at least) that entirely omits those serifs.

~~~
salutonmundo
Most sans-serif fonts poorly distinguish between "I" and "l", I've found.
(This led to my dad thinking that artificial intelligence was called "Al", as
in "Albert".)

~~~
hermitdev
This is why I prefer a fixed width font when it can be ambiguous. They don't
typically have the ambiguities between "l" (lower case "L") and "I" (upper
case "i") or even the number "1", similarly between the letter "O" and number
"0".

Personally, when handwriting, I got in the habit of striking a hyphen through
the number "7" to disambuate against a possible number "1". Likewise, I'd
strike through the letter "Z" to disambiguate from the number "2", and a
diagonal strike through the number "0" to differentiate from the letter "O".

My handwriting is terrible, and it has saved me a lot of grief over the years,
but especially in my engineering courses in college.

~~~
burfog
7 and Z have far less disruptive fixes.

For 7, just make the top long and the slash slanty. Don't do that for 1.

For Z, give the top a very slight curve, and optionally do the same for the
bottom. That is, bend the middle of the line in toward the center of the
letter. It might be enough to just imagine doing this, so that you don't end
up with a curve going the other way. Give the 2 a proper curve instead of a
sharp corner, and it will look different.

~~~
gerdesj
That's fine but the reason I use the extra bits is to try and make a character
unambiguous for a reader who does not know my handwriting habits. In the case
of Z I do both - your suggestion and put a bar across it. 2 gets a small loop
at the bottom left.

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Tomte
I never consciously realized, but I actually prefer the broken bar. No reason,
just nostalgia, I suppose.

I might hunt for a contemporary programming font that renders the pipe so.

~~~
lstamour
I suddenly realized what made reading old Linux books feel so nostalgic - in
at least one of the books I still have, the terminal commands were all printed
using broken bars for pipe, etc. You really don’t see that nowadays, but I
remember it from text-based browsing, horizontal nav bars often used bar/pipe
characters to separate links, and still probably do in footers and dusty
corners...

~~~
taneq
If you really want to feel oldschool, try writing crosses through your zeroes
as well (to distinguish them from O's).

~~~
reaperducer
Or even older school, use a capitol P for a question mark.

Or if you were fancy, a P with a / through it.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Is that a rudimentary typewriter thing?

~~~
reaperducer
Teletype.

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phaedrus
In 2008-9 I had a Neo Freerunner, an early (Linux) smartphone. I also used |
in my passwords. Some of the soft keyboards included only a ¦, in the |
spot—indicating that the programmer/UI-designer believed them interchangeable.
(That is, the character I got on a keyboard by pressing shift-backslash was |
even though it was rendered as ¦ on the keyboard silkscreen, but on the
smartphone it was ¦ on the key and in the typed text.) This made my log-ins
fail in many contexts, and took some inspired thinking to figure out the
problem. That was how I first learned the two are not just different glyphs
for the same character.

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PaulHoule
Funny, I was building a system that needed a way to namespace CSS classes (so
I could suck in HTML from different sources and assemble it into one document)
and I found that class names can contain most of the ISO-LATIN-1 characters
and I chose to use the broken vertical bar to separate namespaces from short
names because hardly anyone uses it.

------
cojxd
From the linked page in the blog of the late Michael Kaplan:

>I'd go look for it but I don't want to move off this page.

The dark days of not having browser tabs...

