[futureduck]

Strange, the background image of the site's header shows a very nice cockpit font indeed, but the actual B612 font is quite different - for instance zeros have no line through them. Though the oxygen indicator seems to use this font.

[racingmars]

Yeah, that always bugged me! The zero-with-a-slash only seems to be used in that flight plan section of the screen; all of the other zeroes are without the slash. And the "5" and "4" next to the zero-with-a-slash in the waypoint 5240N is clearly the B612 glyphs. So it makes me think that in the Airbus software, in contexts where there might be ambiguity between 0 and O or where there are mixed letters and numbers, they use the zero-with-a-slash, but everywhere else (numeric-only readouts, etc.) they use the non-slash zero.

And I wonder if there's a 0-with-a-slash in the downloadable version of the font, enabled with an OpenType stylistic set number or feature or something, or if that zero-with-a-slash is just something custom the Airbus folks do internally.

[sebazzz]

> And I wonder if there's a 0-with-a-slash in the downloadable version of the font, enabled with an OpenType stylistic set number or feature or something, or if that zero-with-a-slash is just something custom the Airbus folks do internally.

According to the Github issue mentioning in a sibling comment:

> We designed the two zeros having in mind the slash one to be used in alphanumerical sequences, and the normal one to be used in numerical sequences. > > You can find it in the ‘private use area’

[Gare]

Checked the Github repository, there are indeed separate "zero" and "slashedzero" glyphs.

[zauguin]

While there is a glyph like that there's no nice way to access it. There is no font feature to enable slashedzero by default and slashedzero is not mapped to U+0030 U+FE00 (Unicode's standard variant for an explicit slashed zero). Instead it's only accessible using the private use codepoint U+E007 and then typically doesn't get copied as a regular zero.

But more generally the font has an empty GSUB table which would be used for such substitutions. I'm wondering if the cockpit display maybe misses support for that and that's why they tried not to use it for anything.

[rbanffy]

Still a worthy bug to be submitted.

[throw0101b]

* https://github.com/polarsys/b612/issues/20

[eshack94]

The hero we need but don't deserve.

[rbanffy]

The workflow to fix things doesn't seem clear - are people supposed to work on the .glif files?

[warrenm]

does it have to do with "knowing" whether the data being displayed is numeric vs alphanumeric?

When alphanumeric, put the slash, when only numeric leave it out?

[ungamedplayer]

Can't wait for a font renderer to get this smart. Any day now...

[ricardobeat]

It’s very unfortunate that these glyphs are not available via OT features or font-variant in CSS. I assume the cockpit software uses glyphs directly instead of using OpenType.

There are two open tickets about it, the second is almost four years old, maybe someone here who is familiar with the tooling could contribute?

https://github.com/polarsys/b612/issues/24

https://github.com/polarsys/b612/issues/20#issuecomment-5448...

[starkparker]

Even the font's designers were unable to contribute due to a lack of merge rights, since they weren't elected by the Eclipse foundation. https://github.com/polarsys/b612/issues/10#issuecomment-4719...

The only user who's demonstrated merge rights on the repo is the repo's Eclipse Foundation project lead, Laurent Spaggiari: https://projects.eclipse.org/content/laurent-spaggiari-proje...

Who's the only listed contributor on the repo: https://github.com/polarsys/b612/blob/master/CONTRIBUTORS.tx...

And who's been publicly inactive on GitHub since the repo's last merge in March 2019: https://github.com/LaurentSpaggiari?tab=overview&from=2019-0...

I don't think any amount of tooling knowledge could facilitate a contribution at this point. It's a dead project. The best anyone could do is apply the steps in issue #24 to a fork and start promoting it.

[delfinom]

Good to see the Eclipse Foundation killed something, again, due to shear incompetence.

[distantsounds]

It's really unfortunate that this glaring issue stops wide adoption. The slash through the zero should have been the default, very silly for the official release to omit that.

[livrem]

The image shows a 0 without a line as well. Maybe the other one is a Ø? Or maybe there are conventions to use slashed zeroes in some places an non-slashed in other places?

[reacweb]

Yes. 0 (not slashed) is ambiguous only in fields that accept also letters.

[rmu09]

It does include the slashed zero, just not at the zero glyph place.

[ho_schi]

I also miss a distinguished 0 (with a line through). With B612 the O and 0 (with a line through) could be mixed up.

[atoav]

I think the goal of the designers wasn't to recreate the font in the plane, but to create their own inspired high legibility font.

[atoav]

(for those downvoting I think this, because this is what I remember to have read years ago when this font came out)