[giraffe_lady]

I picked up the wild ass french numeral 1 from living there in my youth. I still think it's more ambiguous than the english variants but I had so much trouble with people misinterpreting mine I switched and have never been able to shake it.

If you look up examples online they seem fairly reasonable. But in actual daily handwriting they are very extreme. It looks more like a stylized capital A than a number honestly.

[gilleain]

Oh I see, from looking at some examples it's the one without the bar on the bottom? I use the the more French/European '1' to distinguish from a lowercase 'l' (so that C1 does not look like Cl = chlorine).

[giraffe_lady]

Yeah the way I originally learned to do it is with no bottom bar and a short, 45º, straight serif. The french way has a lloooooong curving serif, at least as long as the downstroke. Or at least I think of it as french since that's where I ran into it. Maybe that's the norm in europe?