Vertical Bar

[Mark2Mark]

From a user:

"I was wondering why modern fonts, even those intended for code, do not render the vertical bar | as broken in the middle, as in the Unicode character ¦. This is an obvious solution for differentiating the bar from 1 and I and l, and it has a history behind it in old computer fonts (particularly bitmap ones). I reckon it is not done anymore because Unicode went and made ¦ a separate character – a pretty useless one semantically, I might add. So, I would like to ask the designer of a major recent font design project for code:
Did you consider rendering the bar as broken at some point in the design process?
Was Unicode’s separation of these characters a main motivation for your decision not to?
Do you reckon that the function of differentiating the vertical bar is better served without doing this?
Do you have any more comments about this? …"

[Mark2Mark]

Anyone with opinions on that?

I usually draw the broken bar way taller than the letter height, which is my eyes distinction enough from the letter l. I find the possible confusion with the 1, as that is with its nose clearly different as well.

Personally, all applications I use the broken bar in (e.g twig modifiers, shell or yaml pipe, or operator, SQL string concatenation, …) I would find it rather confusing to see the broken version of it.

• Does anyone pledge for the bar to be broken?
• In which cases would that be preferred?
• Should it be an option for the user to pick? (If so, are there IDE’s that don’t allow OpenType Features to be set?)