Why do some fonts make the I,l,1 characters look identical?
There are fonts where they don't just look similar - they are the same exact pixel locations. Why were they ever created?

I'm guessing this goes back to something historically, for example printing presses where you had to manually possition all the lead blocks for each page.

So if you had many characters that could all use the same block then it was a saving instead of needing 3 sets of blocks for 3 characters, maybe you could get away with 2.
Does anyone know for sure?