Disambiguating (Was: Re: Arabic spelling)

On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 10:28:24 -0400 (EDT), <phild@...> wrote:

> When I was in college in the 1970s, we were taught
> to put the slash on the letter O and leave the zero
> alone. But everyone else seemed to slash the zero.

I think IBM decided ot do it differently from everyone else; back then,
IBM was "the company to dislike", but it has changed radically, and as far
as I can tell, become really decent.

> In the days of dot-matrix printers, people often
> misread slashed-zero as the digit eight, especially
> if the dots were a bit out of alignment. One company
> I worked for actually had me write a routine which
> would intercept data to the printer, and substitute
> a letter O for the zero because of this.

One of the fonts (maybe for screen only), that I see sometimes, has a dot
in the middle of a zero, fairly sure. Another screen font has a
bizarre-looking zero, suggesting a background-color slash overlay.

I routinely run (and reboot) 98 SE.

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
Considering Xandros or Mandrake 10, and not disregarding FreeBSD.
Opera 7.5 (Build 3778), using M2