The author makes a point of avoiding letters that are hard to distinguish even when spelled out in handwriting, but the example table includes the number 7. I can not count the number of times I have found it hard to distinguish between someone's 7 and 1.
It helps if you draw a horizontal bar on the 7 but many don't, so you can never really be sure if a 7 is in fact a 1 with the serif or vice versa.
That's interesting. I've never encountered a 1 that looks like 7 in handwriting. Usually it's I and l that mess with 1. In what style of handwriting is 1 similar to 7? I'd imagine the top bar on 7 is a sufficient differentiator.
>I've never encountered a 1 that looks like 7 in handwriting. [...] In what style of handwriting is 1 similar to 7? I'd imagine the top bar on 7 is a sufficient differentiator.
Here's a deep link to someone in Germany writing down what visually looks like "77.5 :7:7" but his narration says it's actually "11.5 :1:1"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT9je5yo7yM&t=30m44s
This just looks like obviously 11.5 :1:1 to me, the slant would be totally wrong for 7s. I had to check back your comment to be sure you were really talking about these 1s as looking like 7s :)
But this thread reminds me of when I lived in Canada for a while (coming from France) and I did misread numbers very often, which was totally unexpected to me. Yes, 7s and 1s looks very different between Canada (and the US I guess) and France (and probably the rest of Europe).
I haven't had this problem with Belgium though I'm not surprised if the standard here had been chosen to be the same as in France.
They might be obvious ones in the context of this one person. But they are trivially not obvious next to someone who writes one like "|" and then seven is just "|" with any sort of hat. Your slant heuristic immediately fails.
It's "obvious" because 7 is always slanted here. But I know it's not the case in North America and I have a good experience on how numbers can be misinterpreted, as I said.
I was just saying it was obvious to me and it even takes effort to see how they could be misinterpreted. But I know they can be.
Fascinating!
I was born in Europe so I put a horizontal line midway through 7. But now I'm in Canada and nobody else does. It can be a really tiny angular difference between a 1 and a 7 for a lot of people! :)
Same experience, I wilfully switched my handwriting to American 1 (one) as a single vertical line with the European 7 (seven) having an horizontal line midway for disambiguation in a multicultural work environment.
Crossed 7's are fairly common among science majors in American universities. I also cross z's. Again, also fairly common among science majors. (Mine was chemistry.)
in some countries' handwritings the digit one is not a vertical bar but it has a little ascending hook, like a digit seven turned vertical, but with a shorter roof.
so 'muricans mistook my German ones for sevens, all the time, and I had to force myself to write what looks like a pipe symbol vertical bar to me instead of my trusted one.
and to disambiguate, we cross the seven like a lower case eff or tee is crossed.
The handwriting of numbers and letters being confusing between countries is something that's easy to not think about until you've actually faced the issue multiple times.
I'm English, and I can't honestly remember which country it was that I've lived in (I think France...) where there were a couple of numbers that even after living there for a year I still wasn't confident reading when hand-written on things like café menus. And I don't think I would have thought of that being a systemic issue rather than just blaming an individual's handwriting before I lived there, despite having taken over 100 trips to France before moving to live there for a year.
Germans write the number 1 almost like an upside-down capital V. It’s not horizontally symmetrical though, which is why it looks like a 7.
7, 1 I i and l are troublesome because sans serif vs serif fonts and other stylistic choices can make them look like eachother.
A "1" can have a little squiggly roof on it. A big 1-squiggle easily looks like a 7.
If you don't have any 7s in the text (and 1s only - or vice versa!), it's hard to say what they are. I did encounter this multiple times.
I never ran into into this situation, but I plan to update the article based on aggregated feedback. A few good suggestions have been made.
It might be based on the handwriting standards used in your country. Where I live we were taught at school to draw a horizontal bar on 7 and avoid the serif on 1:
https://is.mediadelivery.fi/img/468/a93c32e08dae4768869a4bda...
No chance of confusion. This seems to have prompted some to add the serif to their 1 for stylistic reasons or whatever, since it's still distinguishable from 7 with a bar.
But then again people following older or newer conventions drop the bar from their 7:
https://is.mediadelivery.fi/img/468/46827e3320294f89b12a9338...
This makes a singular 1 with sloppily drawn serif hard to distinguish from a 7 without horizontal bar unless you can also see how the same person draws the other digit in their style.
Where I grew up (Korea), we write 7 with an extra serif at the upper left corner, like this: https://pop.yesform.com/pop/16113
It never gets confused with 1, but in America, people were confusing it with 9 (!!), so I had to stop writing it like that. Can't please everybody...
I can see it as a native-born American.
My handwriting has always been pretty sloppy. My 9s come out like your 7s when I don't close the loop properly (I start at the bottom).
People confuse my lowercase r's for n's all the time too for a similar reason. Either I loop a little too much or I drag down the overhang so it basically is an n.
An alternative way, that makes the "1"s a bit less ambiguous, is to draw a bar at the bottom. So even if you put the serif on the 1, and write it sloppy, you still have the bar at the bottom.
See the last example in this image:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Ha...
Side note to OP and author, the Wikipedia page is pretty handy and has a lot of info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_handwriting_variation
Updated the article. Thanks for the context
A small typo I noticed - "Case-sensitive: 53^5 = 62,259,690,411,360" should be to the eighth power, not the fifth.
Thanks. Fixed
Suggestion: after "a longer ID with a lower chance of visual ambiguity" show how many characters that will be needed to have the same number of IDs as 53^8 using the 22 encoding.
I.e. for a given number of IDs, how many characters are needed in the 53 versus 22 encoding (people who are not good at math might assume it is more than twice as many).
Actually, 53^8 = 62,259,690,411,361 (not ..360)
When it comes to handwritten numbers, Brits frequently mistake German ones for sevens, and Germans British sevens for ones.
The article also mentioned the difficult-to-distinguish aurally "B" (Bravo) and "P" (Papa).
But it did not mention the most similar-sounding pair "F" (Foxtrot) and "S" (Sierra), which are nearly indistinguishable.
While one could use the NATO/Aviation standard alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta...), unless you have a very specifically constrained customer base,it won't help much. Best to also avoid those combinations.
Definitely better to have a slightly longer ID_String and maximal ability to read and speak/hear the characters. It'll save FAR more time and aggravation.
There are many of these ambiguous pairs: B/P, F/S, D/T, M/N, Q/U, ...
The end-to-end transmission can get really bad when you combine several different filter stages, such as a speaker's mouth being injured or obscured, a narrow channel like telephone or radio, noise, and a listener's ear losing parts of the spectrum.
As the sound transmission gets worse, you can get more rhyming ambiguities. Effectively, the consonants are lost in a bad channel and only the vowels come through. In an American English accent, I think these are the groups corresponding to different vowel sounds: A/H/J/K, B/C/D/E/G/P/T/V/Z, I/Y, O, Q/U, F/L/M/N/S/X, R. "W" stands alone with multiple syllables.
Depending on the kind of transmission problem, these groups can start to split apart into smaller subgroups based on which of their sonic differences make it through to the listener.
My family name begins with a 'F' and, indeed, I can't count the number of times where people write a 'S' instead. I've got invoices with a 'S' instead of a 'F'!
Missing in the first part, but In the section "Visually ambiguous dictionary" neither 1 nor 7 is present.