That's interesting. I've never encountered a 1 that looks like 7 in handwriting. Usually it's I and l that mess with 1. In what style of handwriting is 1 similar to 7? I'd imagine the top bar on 7 is a sufficient differentiator.
>I've never encountered a 1 that looks like 7 in handwriting. [...] In what style of handwriting is 1 similar to 7? I'd imagine the top bar on 7 is a sufficient differentiator.
Here's a deep link to someone in Germany writing down what visually looks like "77.5 :7:7" but his narration says it's actually "11.5 :1:1"
This just looks like obviously 11.5 :1:1 to me, the slant would be totally wrong for 7s. I had to check back your comment to be sure you were really talking about these 1s as looking like 7s :)
But this thread reminds me of when I lived in Canada for a while (coming from France) and I did misread numbers very often, which was totally unexpected to me. Yes, 7s and 1s looks very different between Canada (and the US I guess) and France (and probably the rest of Europe).
I haven't had this problem with Belgium though I'm not surprised if the standard here had been chosen to be the same as in France.
They might be obvious ones in the context of this one person. But they are trivially not obvious next to someone who writes one like "|" and then seven is just "|" with any sort of hat. Your slant heuristic immediately fails.
It's "obvious" because 7 is always slanted here. But I know it's not the case in North America and I have a good experience on how numbers can be misinterpreted, as I said.
I was just saying it was obvious to me and it even takes effort to see how they could be misinterpreted. But I know they can be.
in some countries' handwritings the digit one is not a vertical bar but it has a little ascending hook, like a digit seven turned vertical, but with a shorter roof.
so 'muricans mistook my German ones for sevens, all the time, and I had to force myself to write what looks like a pipe symbol vertical bar to me instead of my trusted one.
and to disambiguate, we cross the seven like a lower case eff or tee is crossed.
The handwriting of numbers and letters being confusing between countries is something that's easy to not think about until you've actually faced the issue multiple times.
I'm English, and I can't honestly remember which country it was that I've lived in (I think France...) where there were a couple of numbers that even after living there for a year I still wasn't confident reading when hand-written on things like café menus. And I don't think I would have thought of that being a systemic issue rather than just blaming an individual's handwriting before I lived there, despite having taken over 100 trips to France before moving to live there for a year.
I was born in Europe so I put a horizontal line midway through 7. But now I'm in Canada and nobody else does. It can be a really tiny angular difference between a 1 and a 7 for a lot of people! :)
Same experience, I wilfully switched my handwriting to American 1 (one) as a single vertical line with the European 7 (seven) having an horizontal line midway for disambiguation in a multicultural work environment.
Crossed 7's are fairly common among science majors in American universities. I also cross z's. Again, also fairly common among science majors. (Mine was chemistry.)
