Crossed 7s and Dotted Zeros

When you’re working on a book that’s more than 99% numerals and you start second-guessing your font because of the way the sevens and zeros look! 🙄 I mean, there are probably over 300 thousand of each in there so it should be taken seriously, right? Currently I’m using Cascadia Mono which features a dotted 0 (zero) and a regular 7.

Yesterday in church it crossed my mind that I *never* write zeros like this. See first photo. But I also always cross my 7s, and Zs if you’re keeping score at home. Less out of necessity for clarity (my 7s do not look like my 1s) and more just from being a life long math nerd and learning it in Mrs. Brown’s 8th grade algebra 1 class almost 40 years ago. Did she cross her 7s and Zs? I think so?? I digress.

After briefly looking into the few fonts with crossed sevens, and why they are so rare, I am backtracking. There are not many such fonts because typed 7s and 1s are even less likely to be confused than handwritten 7s and 1s.

You know what does make sense? Crossed or dotted 0s (zeros). 0s and Os are very hard to tell apart, typed or handwritten. And depending on the font, the differences are rather arbitrary.

If that wasn’t enough reason to not switch course, finding a crossed seven font that was monospaced is another issue. And recompiling everything, making sure the new font didn’t mess with the page formatting, etc.

One more thing: In searching for fonts, I happened across Constantia. See second pic. This would be kind of classic looking. But no, it’s not monospaced. Maybe I could find one similar that is, but that won’t be for this book. Nope, I’m too close to pressing that proverbial ‘publish’ button for that. Heck, if I was really ambitious I would convert my own freehand of the ten digits to a font. But then I’d just want to expand that to 20 or 30 or 40 characters to incorporate variations of the same numbers. But to mix those randomly into a 3 million+ digit document would take way more code than I want to mess with!

So Cascadia Mono will remain. I do like this font. The dotted 0s. The 5s and 6s that are distinct and not easily confused (hello engineering drafting software?!?!). And the open top 4s. Really like those.

grace + peace,

mno 2022–09–19