Proofreader Font

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Default Font

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back.
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
01234567890
!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\^_z{|}~
uvw wW gq9 2z 5s il17|!j oO08 `'" ;:,. m nn rn {[()]}

The Problem

Arial

uvw wW gq9 2z 5s il17|!j oO08 `'" ;:,. m nn rn {[()]}

Courier

uvw wW gq9 2z 5s il17|!j oO08 `'" ;:,. m nn rn {[()}

Lucida Console

Prima Sans

Prima Sans Monospace

Proofreader

Times Roman

uvw wW gq9 2z 5s il17|!j oO08 `'" ;:,. m nn rn {[()}

Tiresias PCFont Z

Trebuchet MS

Verdana

Tiresias PCFont Z, Prima Sans and Prima Sans Monospace are BitStream fonts.

Arial, Lucida Console, Trebuchet MS and Verdana are Microsoft fonts that come bundled with various with their operating systems and word processors.

Much of the text may look fine, but it depends on the font you are using which glyphs will look identical or almost identical. It is often easy to tell the letters apart when you see examples side by side, but it becomes much harder when you see them in isolation. Lucida Console is pretty good except for wW.

In traditional hot lead type, sans-serif fonts are for decorative titles and serif fonts are for body text. Serif fonts are more readable and clear. In computer displays, the serifs just smudge at small resolution, so people choose san-serif fonts for body text. Unfortunately, the computer font designers were not thinking and kept the impractical traditional decorative sans-serif character shapes. They need to be modified to make them more distinctive.

The idea of this project is to radically redesign the letters so they are thoroughly distinct. Such a font might also prove useful for accurate OCR (Optical Character Recognition) work. You don’t want any two letters to be the same except for one tiny dot or squiggle, or differ merely in the degree of roundedness. You want a very open design to that it remains legible at small font sizes and low resolution.

I am after a screen font that will render well at low resolution. This is a different problem from a font that can be printed on low quality paper where you must deal with parts of letters disappearing on you, but where you don’t have a pixelation problem.

Many centuries ago some monks had a similar idea. They needed font you could hand-write quickly and legibly. The came up with what we today call lower case.

Letters that are made of more that one piece such as i, j, : ; ! = % | and " bedevil OCR software, and presumbably the human eye. I thought the new design should make each character contiguous. I also thought you should avoid kerning e.g. nestling the e under the shoulders of the W in Wet. I tended to make all letters the same width, or almost the same width, to make them easier to select by mouse and to reduce the possibiliny of mistaking two narrow letters for one fat one.

Here is roughly what I had in mind:

I am reasonably happy with it except for the comma-elements (e.g. right double quote and semicolon). They are not distictive enough yet. I think I might give the double sized bulbs as well as a tail. I was limited by what I could do with a pen plotter. A real font would have more filled in characters. The a and n could be more distinct. They suffers the same problem as u and v.

After I did my initial design, I read that people read words by looking at the outlines of entire words. I redid the characters to be distinct in their tops and bottoms, not just left/right and innards.

I tried to avoid tight angles and small enclosed spaces, which tend to fuzz over at small font sizes. I tried to keep the x-height relatively large so that the type would be maximally legible even when packed together tightly vertically.

I tried to make letters distinct with at least two major differences.

The problem is, when I work to make characters distinct, the lack of unifying elements makes the text look like a ransom note. Perhaps some other convention should be used for caps, perhaps colour or weight. I am not a type designer. All I can do is explain what I want, not how to get there.

Here is what is looks like in small fuzzy type:

Font Legibility Comparison
Lucida Console	Proofreader	Arial

A reader submitted yet another idea of what such a font might look like:

George Bernard Shaw invented a phonetic alphabet for English. Part of his intent was to make the script easy to write with a pencil. The proofreader’s font need not be easy to hand print.

The Mac people have the bit-map pro-font which is like Monaco, but with modifications so you can distinguish all the letters. There are now versions for other platforms.

There are font designing tools to modify or create new fonts, both True Type and PostScript. See Font Creator and Font Lab. The RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People) created a font for the visually impaired called Tiresias.

I wonder what a professional font designer would come up with if he designed each character from scratch with proofreading in mind, so that every character had some macroscopic distinctive feature that would not blur at small font sizes. He would be willing to bend the glyphs a little more than unusual to get maximum distinctiveness. Font designers seem willing to warp fonts in extreme ways for decoration, but not for legibility. I have written to dozens of font designers asking them to tackle this project. So far none have expressed any interest in doing it, though one font company did agree there was a need for such a font.

A group of proofreaders designed their own proofreading font called DPCustomMono2 with letters that are easy to distinguish, with relatively conventional shapes. It is designed to be anti-aliased. If you use it without anti-aliasing, it looks rather flea-bitten.

Another way of approaching this is not letter-shapes, but word-shapes. How do you arrange that entire words have distict shapes?

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