Sans-Serif font with distinguishable I, l and 1?

Is there any sans-serif font which has easily distinguishable differences between upper case I (eye), lower case l (ell) and the numeral 1 (one) and, of slightly lesser importance, between the letter O (oh) and the numeral 0 (zero).

Specifically, I’m looking for a font which allows the reader to know which character they’re seeing when the character is shown in isolation. In particular, a font which displays any one of I, l, or 1 as a single vertical bar is not acceptable, even if they have different widths or heights. All of the fonts I’ve investigated so far use a single vertical bar for at least one of those three characters.

2 Likes

I usually use google fonts for my fonts. There are a ton of them and I can usually find one that suits my needs. Their site is also really useful. You can queue up a bunch of fonts that you’re curious about, and then you can type in a line of text that you want to compare (instead of their default one) and compare them all at once.

So while I don’t have an answer for you, hopefully you can find one there.

1 Like

Here’s another good site I use:
https://www.dafont.com/

But I’m trying to see how one would make an uppercase I (eye) without serifs, but still not a single vertical line. Could you use handwritten styles or perhaps even script styles? The person to ask is S. J. Ross, (@Ghalev) if he’s around anywhere.

I have been spending quite a while looking through the fonts provided by Google , but all of the ones I’ve seen so far don’t meet my needs.

Some san-serif fonts provide minimal serifs on the capital I (eye), which I think is acceptable. Unfortunately, those I’ve found then fail in how they represent the lower case l (ell). sigh

Ok, I found this:

It satisfies the requirements, but IMO is ugly and difficult to read. You could use the editor on the site’s homepage to design your own font, though.

If I were you, I would just edit some open source font with FontForge. It might be easier than you think.

1 Like

I use Source Sans Pro for this sort of thing. However, it does represent capital I as a vertical bar.

I suspect your best bet is a fixed-width programming font which has a minimally serif (but not sans-serif) style. Source Code Pro (not the same as Source Sans Pro) might suit your needs.

Thanks for all the suggestions, guys.

I think Monocerotis is way too stylized. :slight_smile:

After an extensive, maybe complete, search through Google Fonts, I found three that seem to fit my criteria:

IBM Plex Sans
Miriam Libre
Monda

Now to decide which looks best to me.

ETA:
I decided to use IBM Plex Sans (and IBM Plex Serif) because they include italics and many more glyphs.

2 Likes