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Thank you, that's the one thing I'd expect to be a screenshot in a github repo. Regardless, I don't find it particularly legible. The taller aspect ratio with narrow letter gap actually is not super readable to me?

Maybe It's "more readable" for plane screen fonts than the other alternatives. It's not fair looking at a font on a 49" highdef ultrawide and saying "This isn't as good".

There is actually a sample in the repo: https://github.com/polarsys/b612/blob/master/docs/sample.png.

There is a PDF and a PNG in the docs/ folder (https://github.com/polarsys/b612/tree/master/docs), too.

And the mono variant: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/B612+Mono

Funny how it's supposed to be designed to be legible. I read that as "disengage" at first rather than "disregard"

Google using anti-Google text specimens is wild: "...No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy,...". Then again, it could have been edited by Gemini.

To save anyone else the searching: parent's definition of "price-competitive with professional furniture" seems to be $500-$1000 used. I can't find anyone listing a price for new.

Adam Savage mentioned in a Q&A that, many years ago, he stumbled upon dozens of these in an empty parking lot behind an industrial building in SF. Apparently he still uses a couple of them in his workshop.

I hope you stow it in its compartment while your house experiences turbulence like the label demands.

Can I just say, that's a beautiful setup?

What are their innards like? This looks very useful!

Curiously, the photo of the screen shows slashed zeros, while the font sample shows non-slashed zeros.

Oh, interesting. The proportional font looked pretty terrible to me, but I threw the mono at some C++ and it's actually not unpleasant. Maybe worth a longer trial.

46610 decimal = 0xb612 :)

I had not heard of ink traps. Basically, they are characters that try to account for ink bleeding. By putting more negative space in corners, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_trap

But that gives me the impression it would have nothing to do with displays. And makes it a pretty curious choice.

Although I personally dont see any ink traps from the font linked in the comments https://fonts.google.com/specimen/B612

If the font is used primarily as light on black, then light bleeds analogously to how ink does, albeit via a different mechanism. Whether on the screen itself (like CRT) or on our retina.

Ooh, great question. I guess “ink” traps would actually make sense for CRT displays due to phosphor bleed. (See the design of the VT100 font.) However, according to Wikipedia Airbus started using LCDs well before this font was made.

Seems like Page 8 in the PDF/leaflet from the repository talks about it:

> The principle of ‘ink traps’ has existed as long as typography has: it is a small indentation at the junction of letter strokes which ‘traps’ the ink on small characters, so that it doesn't block the junction and affect the legibility. In the case of B612, the ‘light traps’ accentuate the counterforms 7, particularly for the sharp angles� The indentations are always well distinguished, even at a small size, and the contrast between the different strokes of the character is reinforced.

> An incise is a small serif which interrupts the regularity of the vertical line: here it allows to accentuate the clarity of the leading stroke (top part) of the vertical stem 8 to avoid it being rounded off when antialiasing.

That stood out to me as well. Bell Centennial† used that for phonebooks; here I suspect the light-on-dark display has some visual bleeding that this compensates for, especially for tired pilots.

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Centennial

The leaflet (https://github.com/polarsys/b612/blob/master/docs/B612-Leafl...) explains the design thinking behind this. They call them "light traps", though I'm not totally convinced they work well when antialiasing is used.

Stuff that are on display can also be printed (on board in the cockpit) for whatever reasons the pilots decide.

I thought that the printed were using thermal printing (for which I'm not sure the ink traps apply) but maybe not all of them.

Interestingly, a lot of those characters are not Unicode characters: the aircraft motion, weather pictograms, mail, wifi, phone, the "computer science pictograms" such as start/stop/copy/paste/print/trash, and so forth. Specifically, these use Unicode's private use area at E000.

(See B612-Leaflet.pdf page 35.)

It seems they are using the regular zero or a slashed variant depending on the risk of confusion: https://lii.enac.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/B612-PolarSys...

Perhaps that sort of error is not a problem in this particular context. Adding slashes or dots makes the zero or oh look like an eight. This issue affected the design of the FE-Schrift font:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift#Development

Worth underlining that designers work very hard to understand the needs of the particular situation.

Usually type designers consider the legibility of 3, 6, 8, 9, 0 (particularly 8 and 0) to be more important than between O and 0. But for coders, the ambiguity between O and 0 is a big problem, so a designer would consider that.

An example for pilots: you are heading 180 and radio it as "one zero eight". Even if you immediately correct yourself, it's a problem.

Aviation use. They won't allow O and 0 to be valid for the same data.

So there is no need to disambiguate them.

That's true of lots of fonts. I don't think contexts where you would have to distinguish between those two characters are nearly as common in aviation as they are in programming.

What would be displayed in an aircraft cockpit where this ambiguity would matter?

See other comments; a slashed variant is available.

It's the little room in the front of the plane where the pilots sit, but that's not important right now.

That's actually a rather interesting proposition for any application. Hmm..

пулл уп! пулл уп!