Something to think about as you make your theme

Something to think about as you make your theme

by Tim Hunt -
Number of replies: 8
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You might be interested in this tracker issue: MDL-20361

The issue is that with some fonts, it is very hard to distinguish 1lI and so on. And when the student is trying to enter or check the result they typed to a short answer question in the quiz, that can be very important.

Hmm ... it occurs to me that this is more likely to be a problem for a student who is dumbly copying the results from his neighbour, rather than someone who is trying to type what they know. wink

Anyway, I just thought this was an issue you might like to be aware of.
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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Something to think about as you make your theme

by Oleg Sychev -
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Tim wrote "this is more likely to be a problem for a student who is dumbly copying the results from his neighbour" - that can be a problem to the teacher dealing with such student, and that is more important. Also some people have mainly visual memory, that can create problems for them too.

I think it is quite hard to do that when designing a theme since it requires solution for every language and characters.

It is easier to deal with if it could be solved on per-question basis, with some settings for the teacher and (maybe) validation for known cases that could advise teacher what fonts (or font characteristics like serifs, monospace etc) he should choose with given answers and are such problems likely to occur - or automatic changing fonts if answer contains some characters.
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In reply to Oleg Sychev

Re: Something to think about as you make your theme

by Tim Hunt -
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Of the various widely-available fonts that can be safely used on the web, which one does the best job of distinguishing between most characters? And also, which would not look out of place if used for short-answer questions?

If someone can suggest a reasonable default font, I am happy to add it to the base theme.
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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Something to think about as you make your theme

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hi Tim,
I came across this problem recently with a spelling challenge, implemented as a Hot Potatoes JMix quiz, in which students have to drag the jumbled up letters of a phrase back into a meaningful order. The target phrase was "I'd love to", but of course in most sans-serif fonts (e.g. Arial) the uppercase "i" usually looks exactly the same as the lowercase "l".

After a little Googling, I found that Verdana was a widely available font (at least on all major PC platforms) that is suitable for my situation. It is basically sans-serif, but it does distinguish between lowercase "i", uppercase "l" and numeral "1". The attached screenshot shows the Verdana version of the quiz.

For reference, here are the two sans-serif fonts:
  • Arial: I, l, 1
  • Verdana: I, l, 1
And for comparison, here is a serif font:
  • Courier New: I, l, 1
regards
Gordon
Attachment verdana.idloveto.jpg
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: Something to think about as you make your theme

by Tim Hunt -
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Well if something as simple as switching the font to Verdana is the answer, then that would be great. Does anyone else have an opinion?

By the way, my favourite font for development is Andale Mono. That is a beautiful monospaced font, and makes the different characters really clear. (But not suitable for short-answer quiz questions in general.)
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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Something to think about as you make your theme

by Mauno Korpelainen -

Joseph R has suggested Verdana many times before and it makes clear difference between 1, l and I but does not help in all confusables.

I added some comments to http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-20361

And Verdana has a relatively poor unicode support - it has only 893 glyphs and some character combining bugs so you need always a good unicode font in font family if your site needs also other characters than latin letters and numbers.

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In reply to Mauno Korpelainen

Re: Something to think about as you make your theme

by Mauno Korpelainen -

Just as an example about some confusables visit  http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/fontlist.htm

and paste to the sample text field

0OΟОՕଠഠＯpρϱрaɑαаyʏγу1Il|ƖǀΙІӀוןⅠⅼ∣ꓲＩｌ￨

All of these unicode characters are different – some of them are Latin characters, some Greek characters, some Cyrillic characters, some Hebrew characters, some “other” characters – can you see the difference?

Attached some examples about output

 

 

 

 

Attachment Image7.jpg
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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Something to think about as you make your theme

by Oleg Sychev -
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Tim - I guess the best choice is monospace (to avoid issues with joined characters) serif (to decrease the number of characters that could be confused) font.

Now we should only find which monospace serif font gives us more unicode characters.
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