Re: Font recommendations
I got so fed up with these ambiguities that I created my own fonts. I also did some hack work on an existing font that my colleague liked to use (Courier 10 pitch), to make the tilde more wiggly to distinguish it from hyphen-minus, and put what I call a "French nose" on the number one, to distinguish it from small-ell. I also made the curly brackets more curly, to distinguish them from parentheses.
My font creation escapades started with a monospace bitmap font for a white-on-black X terminal. This was back in the days when X11 rendering of vector fonts on a terminal looked really crap, so only a bitmap would save the eyes from fuzziness. Hours of innocent artistic fun ensued. I did not complete anything more than the ASCII character set. Thank goodness I am an Englishman, and don't need all those fussy accents. My Polish friend at work explained how to write an ell-slash and a zed-dot, but I have forgotten already.
Anyway, then I got onto proper vector fonts (Postscript). I attacked the usual technical legibility problems, and some artistic points too. What makes one font more easy to read than another? Why is bad letter spacing so annoying? Can I really do anything new, or is all the best stuff hundreds of years old? I don't know if my efforts were worthwhile. However, I know that if I truly succeeded in my aims, nobody would notice, because they see the content, not the presentation.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
