European numerals

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Some numerals change forms in different countries, and these changes are sometimes confusing to people who are not familiar with them.

The "Crossed Seven" is commonly used throughout Europe, but is sporadically used in the United States, and it is not permitted to be written on some inventory tags that are optically read by computers. This modification of the number seven is caused by the Numeral One with a long initial stroke and no underserif. There are two more forms of the numeral seven used in France, as seen on Citroën cowls: Numeral One with a long initial stroke and an underserif, and a Numeral One with a long initial stroke that starts below the underserif and is concave upward. The Germans have used a Numeral One that has two half-serifs so it looks somewhat like a 'Z'.

The Germans use a Numeral Four that looks like a lightningbolt, and in some areas of Eastern Europe, as seen on Romanian tanks, there is a Numeral Four that does not have a closed loop, but has a Greek cross form of strokes.

The numerals used by Western countries have two forms: "in-line," or "full-height," both as seen on a typewriter and taught in North America, and "old-style," in which numerals 0, 1, and 2 are x-height; numerals 6 and 8 have bowls within x-height, and ascenders; numerals 3, 5, 7, and 9 have descenders from x-height; and the numeral 4 extends a bit both up and down from x-height. There are other terms for both such sets of numerals.

British presses love "old-style" numerals, even though typewriters cannot print them and they do not exist as distinct symbols in Unicode. This has led to confusion, for the Numeral One in old-style looks like a capital "I," but reduced to x-height, not full height. In the U.S.A., the typewritten "I" means a Roman numeral, and in the typewriter age, the minuscule "l" was first used for it, before the separate character "1" was put on the keyboard. A prime example of this confusion is the case of a British typist sending a letter to an editor, as seen in the periodical Spaceflight, about the space flight "Apollo II," for which the reading "Apollo Eleven" would be intended, whereas this would be read by Americans as being Roman numerals, as a non-existent "Apollo the Second." The British, it seems, have given up on Roman numerals, which had been used for aircraft (e.g., Fokker D.VII, Ki-84-III, and Spitfire IX) almost to the end of World War II. It was a policy of the Labour Government of 1945 that they were struck out, although they have since been used in the U.S.A. and Germany (e.g., Douglas D-558-II, Saturn V). They are still used in complex outlines, in which the structure of relations is necessary to be memorized, rather than simple mods of a computer program, which aren't going to be intercorrelated.

Lastly is the distinction between the Danish letter "Ø," the Latin letter "O," and the numeral "0". Handwritten data to be typed into a computer necessitates having a distinction between the oh and the zero. In English-speaking countries, zero was often slashed in technical writing, and was used in many computer keyboards, screens, and printing methods. Some early computerized systems for managers assumed that the numeral would be entered more often than the letter, so they slashed the oh instead. In time this became a minority practice, and it is very confusing for Danish speaking people.

There are three ways of ticking the numeral zero to make it distinct from the letters oh and ø. A tick in the upper right corner derives from the earlier practice, a tick in the upper left corner is used to prevent confusion with all earlier practices, and the very-low-resolution typeface "Fixedsys" has an internal tick, that does not extend beyond the bowl, in both the upper right and lower left. This is the most elegant, but it would take quite a flourish to write it on hundreds of inventory tags. Scandinavian countries prefer a Numeral Zero with a dot in the middle, although low-resolution displays can confuse this with a Numeral Eight, and it takes longer to assuredly make a dot with a ballpoint pen than making a tick.

A note about slashing numerals is that the Numeral Two is not slashed, whereas the Letter Z is, because handwritten form could be confused with the Numeral Two.