Graphic Design Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Graphic Design professionals, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Verdana (the default font of a lot of sites for Windows users) has a symbol that looks like an n for pi:
In Arial, another common font for windows, this looks as expected:
According to this comment:
That pi is intended for Greek language readers.
Is there any reason why the Verdana font is done differently to most?
To clarify which character I'm talking about, it is U+03C0 π GREEK SMALL LETTER PI (HTML π · π), see Wikipedia section on Pi Character Encodings
It is within the possible shapes for the letter Pi capital or small. If you look at this youtube video you will see that this is what his small Pi looks like. So now the question is:
Ideally, you'd do both. Given that Pi appears quite much in just the above context it might be considered a faux pas to use a design incompatible form just to satisfy math use.
It seems weird that a foreign language use can affect the form of your letters. How would you, hypothetically, feel if say a Chinese person told you not to write say w like that because its confused with one of their letters. In fact, many greek letters are idealised from true forms due to math needing them for identifiable highly stylised script forms. But that does not need to be the case.
In my experience with the Greek language, lower-case pi is most commonly written with the top line extending to the sides in print. It may be written as the plain figure version that Arial is using, or the more stylized version commonly known from math, but rarely as a small capital pi. However, as noted in previous answers, this is still an acceptable form of the letter, especially in hand-writing.
The question still remains, why this choice was made. My theory is that for whatever reason, the designer of Verdana preferred to have similarities between certain characters between Greek and Cyrillic. As evidence, I present a couple of other characters where this pattern appears.
As a reference, here is the aformentioned Greek lower-case pi (U+03C0) and Cyrillic lower-case pe (U+043F) in Arial:
Here are the same characters in Verdana. The glyphs are identical:
Here's Greek lower-case kappa (U+03BA) and Cyrillic lower-case ka (U+043A) in Arial:
Here's the same two characters in Verdana. While the glyphs are not identical, kappa has a slight curve at the top, which for Greek is only commonly seen in serif fonts, whereas it is ubiquitous in Cyrillic:
Lastly, Greek lower-case tau (U+03C4) and Cyrillic lower-case te (U+0442) in arial:
...and Verdana. In Arial, the roof of tau is less wide, which is common in Greek, whereas in Verdana, the glyphs of tau and te are identical. While this is easily justifiable from a readability point of view, this is nevertheless another example of a case where Verdana uses an identical glyph in Greek and Cyrillic when it's not obvious that it should:
This the actual shape of a capital π. I have nothing to back this, but It's possible the designer wanted to go for legibility (one of Verdana's strong points) and therefore based their design of the lowercase π character on that of the capital Π. In this case, it's up for debate whether that was a good idea.
