[GreenKeys] M33 "O" (oh) vs "0" (zero)

[Jim Haynes]

On Sun, 18 Apr 2010, nico wrote:
> To make it even more confusing, in danish and norwegian we have the slashed oh, ( Ø on my keyboard ) which is a very normal letter
> Nico
>
And that relates to some of the problems in ASCII, where Teletype people
assumed you could do something like put a tilde or umlaut over a letter
by backspacing and sending the overprint, while the CRT terminals mostly
couldn't do that.

I was also reminded by this discussion of a proposal for hand-writing
characters that appeared in an ACM publication some years ago.  It
included writing 'oh' with a little curlicue on top, like a Q upside
down, to distinguish it from zero.  And adding serifs to S to distinguish
it from 5.  There's the mostly European convention of writing Z
with a crossbar in the middle, I guess to distinguish it from 2.
And of writing 7 with a crossbar, I guess to distinguish it from 1,
which gets a top serif to distinguish it from I.