Windows font that clearly disambiguates the number ZERO from letter O

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+3 Q:

Windows font that clearly disambiguates the number ZERO from letter O

Our intranet web pages need to clearly disambiguate between the letter O and the number ZERO. Is there a screen+printer font that is installed on WindowsXP and Vista that does this either putting a dot inside zero or a slash through it?

If there isn't such a font on the machines themselves, is there a way to embed the font in the page, or some other way for the web page to substitute a glyph for the zero glyph in one of the standard fonts, like Arial?

Thanks

+2 A:

The Windows system fonts FixedSys and Terminal have slashes in the zero.

JacobM 2010-08-23 16:16:20

Terminal is not available on Win XP Pro. FixedSys works OK but has a couple of drawbacks: it cannot go smaller and it gets very jagged when made larger. I forgot to mention cross-browser compatibility in my question: FixedSys works on FF, IE, Opera but not on Chrome or Safari. Thanks

Tim 2010-08-25 12:29:55

+1 A:

The Terminal font that comes with Windows XP has that distinction between 0 and O built-in. However, it's not a TrueType font, so I am not sure this fits your needs.

Android Eve 2010-08-23 16:19:38

Thanks. I remember Terminal. Not available on XP Pro though.

Tim 2010-08-25 12:30:22

Huh? Before I posted the above comment, I actually checked on my copy of XP Pro. Did you mean XP Home?

Android Eve 2010-08-27 20:17:57

Sorry, I was looking for the font in Word's font-list and it wasn't there; and when you paste text in Terminal font into Word, it seems the font gets converted into something else; the zero glyph is rendered without a slash.

Tim 2010-10-04 17:44:12

There's a very nice font here called Anonymous - credit to Mark Simonson for his work... easy on the eye... also, there's Bitstream Vera Sans, another type...

tommieb75 2010-08-23 16:22:23

Thanks for the link to Anonymous. Yes, easy on the eyes, and free, which will please the powers-that-be.

Tim 2010-08-25 12:37:43

There's a Unicode character Ø, U+00D8: Latin Capital Letter O With Stroke. If you can substitute that character it works in Arial and probably most other Windows fonts.

Mark Ransom 2010-08-23 16:25:35

Although that could make for some unexpected results if the user tries to copy and paste such text.

Josh Kelley 2010-08-23 16:30:44

@Josh, if copy and pasting were the solution it wouldn't be so important to distinguish the characters. But I see your point.

Mark Ransom 2010-08-23 16:41:48

It does have to be an actual ZERO codepoint because our users do sometimes cut data from the screen and paste into other systems, but often they're just writing down by hand what they see on the screen or reading it out to someone on the other end of the phone. We are using several crazy-quilt legacy systems, and the migration "strategy" to the new system is lunacy. If the luddite owner of the company had his druthers, users would be tracking data by writing it on the palms of their hands.

Tim 2010-08-25 12:48:06

@Tim, oh well it was worth a shot. Maybe this answer will work for somebody else some day.

Mark Ransom 2010-08-25 13:46:56

Consolas, which comes with Vista and Windows / IIRC, has a slashed zero.

You might find one of these other programming fonts useful too.

spiral 2010-08-24 18:54:50

Thanks for the links to the programming fonts. Consolas not available on XP Pro, though.

Tim 2010-08-25 12:35:52

By using @font-face you can embed a font into the page so that it will be downloaded as needed. There are a few sites now that will provide fonts to embed, many of them free; one example is Inconsolata hosted by Google.

Mark Ransom 2010-08-25 14:04:44

Thanks for this!

Tim 2010-08-26 11:33:17

ansaurus

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Windows font that clearly disambiguates the number ZERO from letter O

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