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".
kergonath · 3h ago
> Thank you, that's the one thing I'd expect to be a screenshot in a github repo.
Indeed. That’s clearly missing from the readme.
> 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".
Yeah. Their benchmark was suboptimal conditions in an aircraft cockpit. I would assume that they tested drastically different lighting conditions and exotic factors (for a font designed for computers) such as motion, vibration, and crew exhaustion.
cratermoon · 2h ago
It's very readable at small sizes. Try 8 point.
Edit: even better, grab a METAR from your favorite airport and drop it in at 8 point
Funny how it's supposed to be designed to be legible. I read that as "disengage" at first rather than "disregard"
Night_Thastus · 4h ago
It may account for the specific displays used in the cockpit, the colors of the font and background, and maybe even interior lighting.
IOW it may be more optimal in its real usage.
octo888 · 4h ago
Not just me. Maybe it's how it's displayed on the web. I had an immediate "this is awful" response LOL
fmajid · 2h ago
The kerning is not great, for starters
atoav · 1h ago
Legible != Readable
Legability means you have to be able to differenciate words and letters. With a font specialized for aerospace use that probably also mean it has to retain that quality when printed on panels.
A special requirement I would think of is legability while in motion. Try taking your favourite, perfectly kerned font and reading it while shaking your head wildly in poor light conditions, then you get a hint of why this font isn't optimized for looks.
dude250711 · 3h ago
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.
This seems as good a thread as any to post this in:
If you're fond of aviation aesthetics, I was recently looking for a workshop cart to occupy a 60x40 cm space and couldn't find any, until I realized that (a) standard issue half-size ATLAS airplane galley trolleys are 30x40 cm and (b) they can be bought by regular people and are very price-competitive with professional grade workshop and office furniture.
It's also nice to have a constant reminder to stow them in case I take off or land my office.
ghostly_s · 2h ago
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.
sho_hn · 2h ago
Yup, mine were 650 EUR a piece new with the drawers shown in the other comment from https://trolley-dolly.de/ (one of several shops I found), though it looks like they now stopped with trolley+drawers bundles.
I was looking at the used market at first, but it turns out that a lot of those are enthusiast collectibles and don't seem to be cheaper than new ones when in good condition, i.e. airline branding bumps the price up, sometimes considerably.
It's obviously all >IKEA, but if you compare this to stuff like Lista office drawers or automotive workshop trolleys it's maybe half, and much closer to the pricing of lower-end stuff from a big brand chain toolstore--but with higher build quality, superior rigidity, better wheels and brakes, and being lighter to move around since the application is weight-conscious. Add the subjective neat-ness factor and I think it's worthy of consideration :)
cromka · 2h ago
Seems like a life-hack to me, great job!
quokka · 27m ago
I found some on sale for around $300 on Etsy. Shipping is very expensive, so they would probably make sense only if you can manage local pickup.
_charlier · 2h ago
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.
delta_p_delta_x · 1h ago
Can I just say, that's a beautiful setup?
kqr · 3h ago
What are their innards like? This looks very useful!
sho_hn · 2h ago
Since the inside dimensions and mounting rails are standard, there's lots of different compatible inserts you can get.
I cheapened out a bit at that point and went with double-height plastic drawers:
Drawers generally come in single/double and plastic or aviation-grade welded alu.
There's also a bunch of funky stuff like cages to keep hot bread in for serving, and an after-market of "galley trolleys as designer furniture" companies that turn them into minibars with wine chillers and bottle storage and what not.
moffkalast · 2h ago
I hope you stow it in its compartment while your house experiences turbulence like the label demands.
dotancohen · 1h ago
That's how the wife knows he's being serious during an argument. He goes and stows his trolleys.
In particular, a screen of an Airbus screen and a video showing parts of the creation are provided.
kens · 2h ago
Curiously, the photo of the screen shows slashed zeros, while the font sample shows non-slashed zeros.
AlfredDogsbody · 1h ago
I noticed the same thing. It's the first thing I check when someone describes a font as "legible." I want to see O0olI|i diplayed.
cge · 16m ago
Something I have never been able to find an explanation for with B612: why is the final sigma character (ς) vertically offset downward from every other Greek character? It makes for very jarring text, and there doesn't seem to be any explanation anywhere.
uyzstvqs · 4h ago
There's also B612 Mono, for use in your text editor or terminal.
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.
6SixTy · 1h ago
One thing I've noticed with this font though is that the square and round brackets look very close to each other.
One of the Monaspace family fonts is very aesthetically similar to B612, but the round bracket is very exaggerated compared to the square bracket.
BasilPH · 31m ago
> Apparently, the link to Intactile DESIGN - intactile[dot]com - in the README file is now redirecting to a gambling site, probably due to Intactile going out of business?
Designed for ease and efficiency of reading and to make letters unambiguous by "maximising the distances between forms to allow for easy, clear identification of each character" [0, p. 7]. Compare FE-Schrift [1], which is designed for number plates to make letters unambiguous in the sense of hard to convert one into another by masking or adding parts:
It's interesting to me that those fonts seem to include ink traps: curious if this has anything to do with the display tech that's used in the cockpit
crazygringo · 13m ago
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.
nonethewiser · 3h ago
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.
Set font size slider to 300px and you will notice them. I'd love to see the study that decided this was the right move. For a digital display its just noise and won't even render correctly at small sizes without a high dpi display. I doubt they would do this just for stylistic purposes. Seems like a very odd decision to me.
sho_hn · 3h ago
It seems far too deliberate not to be so. Wonder about the reason too. Maybe dual-use with printouts?
Edit: I found their reasoning:
"Moreover, activity analysis has highlighted possible impairment in
reading context: variations of light and viewing angle, high cognitive load for the pilot etc�
So, B612 has created a concept of increased legibility of shape for
less ideal situations and associated methods of mark corrections,
to optimise the final rendering of the text and on-screen reading,
particularly with the use of incises and ‘light-traps’ .
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.
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 indenta-
tions are always well distinguished, even at a small size, and the
contrast between the different strokes of the character is reinforced."
The doc also has a photo of their experimental test environment (unsurprisingly: a cockpit) and info on the test process.
mbreese · 3h ago
I didn’t know about ink traps, but I did notice them right away in the sample images. I was guessing that it would help increase legibility when it was embossed or in raised printing on a physical button.
wrs · 3h ago
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.
athenot · 3h ago
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.
Just in case anyone is wondering about the name: B612 is Saint-Exupery's "Little Prince"'s planet (asteroid). A real-life asteroid has then been named B612, but its number is actually 46610.
bitwize · 2h ago
46610 decimal = 0xb612 :)
ApolloFortyNine · 3h ago
In my opinion, the newer Atkinson Hyperlegible (Next) looks easier to read long term. Maybe B612 is 'better' when you have to read just a few words on a screen, but I've switched to Hyperlegible recently for ebooks and have enjoyed it.
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.)
java-man · 4h ago
I don't understand why 0 and O look nearly identical.
Now that is an interesting picture! I am far from being a UI expert, but I do dabble and i would not have thought both forms of zero could be used in the same HMI display to lower cognitive load.
Very interesting! Thanks.
java-man · 35m ago
Different contractors, probably.
atonse · 2h ago
Wow that looks WAY better in the picture than in the various screenshots (and google fonts) we're all looking at. It looks very clean and legible.
upofadown · 3h ago
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:
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.
ilc · 3h ago
Aviation use. They won't allow O and 0 to be valid for the same data.
So there is no need to disambiguate them.
illamint · 3h ago
It's funny, though, there's literally an example of this in the picture located on the ENAC project page for this font in the flight plan screen:
I don't know how this font is encoded, but it's often the case in modern fonts that variant glyphs are mapped to the same code point (i.e. U+0030 in this case) so you can't directly type the variants. If you want to use them then your software needs to understand how to select font features.
The first pic shows the slashed 0, which is what I'd expect if there's any chance of confusion.
But in general, aviation is pretty paranoid over this stuff.
teraflop · 3h ago
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.
jeffbee · 3h ago
What would be displayed in an aircraft cockpit where this ambiguity would matter?
bitwize · 2h ago
I want to love B612 more than I do, but the ohs and zeroes look identical, which ruins it as a terminal/editor font.
amelius · 3h ago
How about the flight manuals?
eastbound · 3h ago
B612 is the of the asteroid in The Little Prince from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Seemed strange that they used a name starting with B for an Airbus ;)
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".
Indeed. That’s clearly missing from the readme.
> 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".
Yeah. Their benchmark was suboptimal conditions in an aircraft cockpit. I would assume that they tested drastically different lighting conditions and exotic factors (for a font designed for computers) such as motion, vibration, and crew exhaustion.
Edit: even better, grab a METAR from your favorite airport and drop it in at 8 point
IOW it may be more optimal in its real usage.
Legability means you have to be able to differenciate words and letters. With a font specialized for aerospace use that probably also mean it has to retain that quality when printed on panels.
A special requirement I would think of is legability while in motion. Try taking your favourite, perfectly kerned font and reading it while shaking your head wildly in poor light conditions, then you get a hint of why this font isn't optimized for looks.
If you're fond of aviation aesthetics, I was recently looking for a workshop cart to occupy a 60x40 cm space and couldn't find any, until I realized that (a) standard issue half-size ATLAS airplane galley trolleys are 30x40 cm and (b) they can be bought by regular people and are very price-competitive with professional grade workshop and office furniture.
Now I own these and they're amazing:
https://mero.ng/i/xnZNqouw.jpg
I especially like the little pull-out tables at the top (they're right next to https://eikehein.com/assets/images/makercorner.jpg).
It's also nice to have a constant reminder to stow them in case I take off or land my office.
I was looking at the used market at first, but it turns out that a lot of those are enthusiast collectibles and don't seem to be cheaper than new ones when in good condition, i.e. airline branding bumps the price up, sometimes considerably.
It's obviously all >IKEA, but if you compare this to stuff like Lista office drawers or automotive workshop trolleys it's maybe half, and much closer to the pricing of lower-end stuff from a big brand chain toolstore--but with higher build quality, superior rigidity, better wheels and brakes, and being lighter to move around since the application is weight-conscious. Add the subjective neat-ness factor and I think it's worthy of consideration :)
I cheapened out a bit at that point and went with double-height plastic drawers:
https://mero.ng/i/RixswvHW.jpg
Drawers generally come in single/double and plastic or aviation-grade welded alu.
There's also a bunch of funky stuff like cages to keep hot bread in for serving, and an after-market of "galley trolleys as designer furniture" companies that turn them into minibars with wine chillers and bottle storage and what not.
In particular, a screen of an Airbus screen and a video showing parts of the creation are provided.
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/B612+Mono
One of the Monaspace family fonts is very aesthetically similar to B612, but the round bracket is very exaggerated compared to the square bracket.
https://github.com/polarsys/b612/issues/37
[0] https://github.com/polarsys/b612/blob/master/docs/B612-Leafl...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift
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
Edit: I found their reasoning:
"Moreover, activity analysis has highlighted possible impairment in reading context: variations of light and viewing angle, high cognitive load for the pilot etc�
So, B612 has created a concept of increased legibility of shape for less ideal situations and associated methods of mark corrections, to optimise the final rendering of the text and on-screen reading, particularly with the use of incises and ‘light-traps’ .
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.
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 indenta- tions are always well distinguished, even at a small size, and the contrast between the different strokes of the character is reinforced."
From page 8 of: https://github.com/polarsys/b612/blob/master/docs/B612-Leafl...
The doc also has a photo of their experimental test environment (unsurprisingly: a cockpit) and info on the test process.
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Centennial
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.
https://airbus-shop.com/en/52-watches
[1] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible+Next
I kid …
https://github.com/polarsys/b612/blob/master/docs/sample.png
(See B612-Leaflet.pdf page 35.)
Very interesting! Thanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift#Development
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.
So there is no need to disambiguate them.
https://lii.enac.fr/projects/definition-and-validation-of-an...
Also seems to be more discussion of this point the last time this was posted:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37519166
It also seems like there's a "slashed zero" glyph in the font, though I don't know how to actually type it:
https://github.com/polarsys/b612/blob/master/sources/ufo/B61...
There seems to be an unofficial variant here that might be more useful for coding: https://github.com/carlosedp/b612
In CSS you can use font-feature-settings.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/...
But in general, aviation is pretty paranoid over this stuff.
Some previous discussions:
2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18946601
2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37517567