Minding your Is and Ls

[presidentender]

Paypal sent a client of ours a JPEG of his API keys. He just spent six hours of his own time and an hour of mine figuring out that this was the problem.

Seriously, there's no reason to do that. Use a serif, monospaced font when the distinction is important.

 

[Cogman]

Why Should you do that? llll||||llllllll|||||||||llllllllll||||||||lllllllllIIIIIIIlllllll

 

[Markbnj]

lt's reaiiy not that blg a deai.

 

[brianmanahan]

IoI

 

[Colt45]

Real men use courier.

 

[Aluvus]

Originally posted by: presidentender
Paypal sent a client of ours a JPEG of his API keys. He just spent six hours of his own time and an hour of mine figuring out that this was the problem.

Seriously, there's no reason to do that. Use a serif, monospaced font when the distinction is important.

Better still: disallow ambiguous characters, or only use one of the pair of characters that can be confused with each other (and do something intelligent if the user enters the wrong one).

 

[Chapbass]

So you must be one of the guys that love that Microsoft product keys use both 8's and B's right?

 

[presidentender]

Originally posted by: Chapbass
So you must be one of the guys that love that Microsoft product keys use both 8's and B's right?

8s and Bs wouldn't be so bad. This JPG had two vertical line characters, one of which was a lowercase L, and the other an uppercase I. Being as obsessive as I am, I took the image into Paint.NET and placed them next to each other. They're exactly identical. 8s and Bs are distinguishable, if not at a glance, then upon inspection.

I agree, though, that disallowing ambiguous characters would be a good thing.

 

[Nothinman]

Yea, I've run into that enough with I and L and O and 0 that I make sure to use a font that distinguishes between them well.

 

[duragezic]

Haha, I found this exact problem with files from a customer. I had to mention it several times and use Courier New to illustrate the difference (we had received two files otherwise identical, one with an l (wrong) and one with an I).