: Recommendation for Helvetica-like font with excellent distinguishability I am looking for a recommendation for a font which has certain properties. It is for use in figures in a scientific publication.

@Vandalay110

I was trying to find a Helvetica-esque font for a presentation in which I was using I as a recurring variable and decided to use Lucida Sans Typewriter for the I's to make them more distinguishable. It is also in most standard OS installs.

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@Odierno310

I like Droid Sans myself. There are several varieties, two of which are Mono and Fallback (proportional).

The specific one I use is the one WITHOUT the ugly dot (or slash) in the center of the zero.

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@Harper654

Make your own font. Take a font which is in the public domain, get a font editing tool, and make the tweaks you want for your purposes.

That's common anymore, the tools being so readily available.

And as IBM shows with their Plex series, you certainly can use serifs to distingush the EYE's and ell's and zeroes, without making it a serif font, or ugly. Seriously, edit 3 characters and I think you'd be doing the world a favor. "Techvetica" or something.

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@Angela777

How about Eurostile

It's pretty good stuff.

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@Cody3331749

Personally, I like the Johannes Kepler (kp) font (http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/kpsansserif/), which is available with and without serifs (you'd probably need the sansserif) and in all those variants that are required for scientific texts (italic, typewriter, small caps...). Good for math typesetting, too. I, l and 1 are clearly different, even more so if you use the oldstyle numbers.

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@Dunderdale640

Some other Helveticaish Options:

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@Gonzalez368

One very nice (if you ask me) option is IBM’s new set of fonts called Plex. The family includes both a sans-serif, a serif, and a monospaced variant, all with excellent distinctiveness (1/I/l and O/0 are easily distinguished and it has both dotted and slashed alternates available for zero), and the entire family is free and open-source.*

At the moment, only Latin-script languages are supported (though the family does support a wide variety of diacritics), but more are in the works (Cyrillic is nearly done; Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Thai will kick-off soonish; CJK will follow some time in mid-2018). Sadly no small-caps (yet).



You can download it through FontSquirrel or straight from the IBM GitHub where it’s hosted.

 



* Or at least it will be open source. The actual source files that you can use to compile your own fonts from scratch won’t be available until 2018, though all the compiled font files are available now.

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@Caterina889

Well the difficult part is the "free" aspect...

I have several typefaces in my library that may meet most of your requirements:
- Museo Sans
- Bunday Sans
- Source Sans

I'm not certain Museo or Bunday are free.... However, I believe Source Sans is free, if it fits your needs.

None have an easy slashed zero, but they all have a unicode symbol for the slashed zero.



And if a monospaced font is acceptable, there are many.

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@Goswami567

Your requirements are somewhat contradictory, potentially even mutually exclusive. You specify sans serif as a requirement, but the thing that distinguishes the similar characters in your example is the serifs. That said, there are probably some typefaces out there that would be a reasonable compromise. My first suggestion would be Anonymous Pro : www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro
Like many fonts that fit your requirements, it is aimed at coders. Many more, with discussions regarding their pros and cons, can be found in this article : www.slant.co/topics/67/~best-programming-fonts
Even if none of them are perfect, it will probably help to inform your choice. Happy hunting!

Another option would be to use a font editor to doctor Helvetica to suit your specific use case, but this would require purchasing some font editing software and learning how to use it. This may be trivial or prohibitive, depending on your skill set.

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