Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/19/proofreading-trick-use-a-proofreader-friendly-font.html
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Not too well suited for Polish texts, i think. I did misread the 1 (one, with the stroke) as a ł (ell-with-stroke) in the example.
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Also an excellent choice of font to program in! See that crossed ‘1’ and dotted ‘0’? see that big dot on the ‘i’? Many ugly little human errors can be avoided by using such a font.
([ripply lines flashback] long ago debugging a FORTRAN program on a green only terminal with a line “k=1” in it, where the original intent was to set k=l (that is, not k set to one, but k set to the current value of ‘ell’) and no, i didn’t write the program, i just had to debug it. took me a couple of days to find that one @#$!)
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Atkinson Hyperlegible is great, except for one error I’ve noticed: the ‘1’ is not the same width as all the other numbers, like it should be.
If that flaw were fixed, I’d use Atkinson Hyperlegible as my default for nearly everything.
+1 for “ripply lines flashback”!
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[Smacks self in the forehead for not thinking of this years ago.]
Thanks. This, I can use.
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Old bitmap fonts had some of these properties. Trying to see 80 column text on a composite NTSC signal on an old TV tube meant that some of those old systems made some compromises in fonts. Also the people making them weren’t really typesetters. The TI 99/4 and other systems had weird square O and dotted 0 just to make it easier to tell the glyphs apart on a low resolution interlaced displays. IBM PC’s CGA font made most of the lines double width because a peculiar property of how they encoded color would make the text turn strange colors if you drew it too thin. (40 column mode made this less of an issue, because it’s equivalent to doubling ever pixel’s width)
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If people want something similar to this but less freaky-looking, it’s based on DejaVu Sans Mono
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If people are having trouble downloading from the discussion boards, you can get it from their github page:
https://github.com/DistributedProofreaders/dproofreaders/raw/master/styles/fonts/DPSansMono.ttf
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Fairly useless unless your copy is only at the galley stage, if it’s laid out in book form then you need the font that the typesetter chose, else how are you supposed to spot hyphenations, widows, orphans, etc.
…unless you plan on proofing it twice? and what’s the point of that!
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Comic Sans is the font of Western dyslexics. IIRC readers of ideographic characters don’t suffer dyslexia. It’s a font thing.
Why wouldn’t you proof it (more than twice) before a typesetter starts work?
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Yep.
And we used to just change the font for proofreading purposes at this stage.
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I still have a love for Courier, due to a misplaced nostalgia for all night editing sessions.
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Covfefe!!!
But, frankly, comic sans makes it more fun. 
I am a typesetter…
…I usually get asked to proofread it at the same time…
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Does that mean it hasn’t been proof read at all before it’s given to you? 
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Quite often not…
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