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When I saw the question Exercises for pronouncing 'I', I thought it was asking about "L" (which native speakers of Japanese and Korean have difficulty with), rather than about "i".

Should we use a font that distinguishes between "l" and "I"?

I know that some fonts distinguish between the two, such as Comic Sans MS.

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  • 7
    I hope the suggestion of Comic Sans is a joke.
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Commented Jan 31, 2013 at 1:34
  • 3
    @StoneyB I call it incentive ... for someone else to suggest a suitable font.
    – Golden Cuy
    Commented Jan 31, 2013 at 1:55
  • 4
    Well, there's not much point in thinking about it until we're approaching the end of Public Beta, when we get to design the site. Me, I prefer serif faces with lots of black and big visible points; but I can live with almost anything except Comic Sans or TNR.
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Commented Jan 31, 2013 at 1:59
  • 3
    @StoneyB when it's just a stylistic thing, it can wait, but something that affects usability should be dealt with earlier than that.
    – Golden Cuy
    Commented Jan 31, 2013 at 6:58
  • I'll take the incentive. Verdana. Plain and differentiating. I'll see about knocking up a script or some easy method of implementing it.
    – Andrew Leach
    Commented Jan 31, 2013 at 15:25
  • 2
    @Andrew Verdana lacks most of the IPA characters required to represent English phonetically. Tahoma will work, and distinguishes the two characters.
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Commented Jan 31, 2013 at 18:39
  • 2
    Consider tagging this as [bug] to draw the attention of the SE developers, who'd have to implement this change.
    – TRiG
    Commented Feb 3, 2013 at 17:33

1 Answer 1

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Don't wait. Do it for yourself and let others know.

Using a custom CSS for this site makes the trick.
You may write it manually (mine is for FF) and do whatever you want within, even Comic Sans :) Your browser will use it whenever the matching URL's are open.

@-moz-document url-prefix("http://ell.stackexchange.com"), url-prefix("http://stackoverflow.com") {
  body {
   font-family:Tahoma !important;
  }
}

Note: Tahoma is Serif-type font, so I and l differ.

And/or download a browser plug-in to manage "skins":

There are other plugins for this purpose, of course. Look up at SuperUser.

The good thing about plugins is that they let you access user-submitted CSS libraries. There are many for StackExchange. Not that I like them, but everyone has different taste.

Style for SO

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