Slashed Zero
A distinction exists between the Danish/Norwegian 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 and Norwegian speaking people.
There are three ways of ticking the numeral zero to make it distinct from the letters O 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.
Read more about this topic: Arabic Numeral Variations
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