: Which typeface is suitable for marking of wires? I work as technician in company engaged in industrial automation. Our company need to find suitable typeface for marking of wires in electric

@Si6392903

Another possibility not yet mentioned would be OCR-A. While it is ugly, it is designed to be readable, or at least decipherable, in the presence of significant defects or distortions. Further, most characters have enough unique features that a small portion of a character may be recognizable even if most of the character is missing or obscured. I don't know that any versions of Windows includes an OCR-A font, but such fonts are widely available from many free or low-cost sources.

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@Kevin459

You might want to try Roboto, which also includes a Condensed version. This typeface is a nice looking sans-serif which looks a little bit "squared", but not too much.

The standard version has several weights while the condensed version only features Light, Normal and Bold. They all come in Italic as well:

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@Smith574

I would suggest you these great fonts, many of them come with lots of variants.


Open Sans
Montserrat
Raleway
CooperHewitt
Roboto
EXO
Inconsolata
Anonymous (PRO)
Droid Sans
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono


some useuful links: google fonts | fontsquirrel
dafont-com | free-fonts-com
(I could not post more than 2 links)

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@Dunderdale640

First thing which comes to my mind is Arial Narrow or Letterica Condensed. The latter is IMO a better variant of Arial Narrow, but I am not sure about the weight, if there is a medium variant.

Another font which fits in the description, more or less, is Franklin Gothic family. Here is the "medium condensed" variant:



This particular font has a more legible "1" and variable stroke widths, which kind of slightly remedies the readability. Note that any sans-serif font cannot achieve the readability level of a good serif font. So if it really matters, consider a serif font.

FI: if one needs a slashed or dotted zero, there are ways to do it manually, e.g. in InDesign one can even combine it from two character using manual kerning or draw an outline glyph and paste it instead of zeros.

Note, I cannot give any comments regarding licensing of that fonts.

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@Heady304

Hack is libre/open source and is designed with unambiguous characters. It's meant for editing code on screen even at small font sizes, but label printing isn't exactly high-resolution so lends itself to something nice and clear. Monospacing that holds even when bold/oblique is also useful.

Here's a sample from their own website:

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@Margaret771

This might sound like asking the Pope if he's catholic, but do you know the site Fontsquirrel? It has a large collection of fonts that can be used for free even for commercial use. Many of them are of great quality.

Instead of suggesting one particular font, I would suggest using the tags and classifications FontSquirrel provides to narrow their collection down to your requirements, e.g.:
www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/list/tag/condensed
Based on this list, I could suggest 'Bebas' and 'Antonio'. And their might be more if you scroll down the list.

--

---Edit---

Allright then… Let's throw some examples in:

Bebas:



Antonio:


OSP DIN:

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@Gail6891361

Consolas comes installed with Windows as standard, so widely available, and has distinct 0 and 1 glyphs.

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@Gail6891361

I would suggest some standardized font such as German DIN 1451. This means you find many vendors for the same font and can even implement it on your own if needed for some proprietary system. Its also available in many different forms.



Image 1: One of the available Din fonts

Taking the same thinking further you can chose to use some other standardized font such as a IS0 3098 based lettering font or one based on the American counterpart ASME Y14.5M. Many implementations available.

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