At 11:18 AM 4/17/2001 +0200, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
>When font designers have trouble leaving enough clues to distinguish
>between "1" and "l", there is no reason to believe they will distinguish
>between "o" and a small Omicron.
There is absolutely no reason why type designers should distinguish between
an o and an omicron. These letters are cognates: they have a shared origin
and a shared written and typographic heritage, along with the Cyrillic o.
Attempts to distinguish them -- e.g. by making the omicron wider, as in the
original Helvetica Greek of the 1970s -- introduce distinctions where none
exist, and the result looks unconvincing and artificial (hardly surprising,
it _is_ unconvincing and artificial). These characters share a glyph
representation because the Greek and Latin scripts are related. They share
common forms because they have them from a common source.
John Hudson (who always distinguishes his 1's from his l's, but never his
o's from his omicrons)
Tiro Typeworks | Girls who wonder ou est la bibliotheque
Vancouver, BC | make me go all googly.
www.tiro.com | - Dean Allen, textism.com
tiro@tiro.com |
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