alt Hacker News> Calibri font has "I" and "l" the same, according to Wikipedia. A better font should avoid characters being too similar (such as "I" and "l" and "1").
Only when used in a context where they can be confused. This is a situation where HN is going to give bad advice. Programmers care deeply about that stuff (i.e. "100l" is a long-valued integer literal in C and not the number 1001). Most people tend not to, and there is a long tradition of fonts being a little ambiguous in that space.
But yes, don't use Calibri in your editor.
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It's not like the State Department would ever mention Kim Jong the Second in documents.
> Most people tend not to
Yeah because normal people never have to deal with alphanumeric strings...
Yes, exactly this. Judging a document font based on how well it functions as a programming font is weird.
"Only when used in a context where they can be confused."
So what are you supposed to when you're typing along and suddenly you find yourself in such a context? Switch the font of that one occurrence? That document? Your whole publishing effort?
Capital "i"s without crossbars aren't capital "i"s. They're lower-case Ls. Any font that doesn't recognize this should be rejected.
> Most people tend not to
Except the whole rationale for going to Calibri in the first place was that it was supposedly more accessible due to being easier to OCR.