> Speaking of Finland, my father was there for two years as a young man, and came away writing all his 7's with a - through them. This is the way I grew up writing my 7's.
> A few years back, someone looked at a 7 I had written and said something about it being pretentious to write that way. Made me pause for all of about 2 seconds before deciding that *my* way was better. Who wants to have a bunch of naked 7's running around?
>
> Ti'So what if I'm pretentious...I'm still right!'cia

That's how I make my sevens. Horizontal bar on top, vertical line starting from the end of the bar and going down, and a dash through the middle. I used to make closed off fours, the ones with the triangles and the sticks, but i switched to the open-faced ones instead, because I find them easier. My ones look like this, except without the dots:

../|
/..|
....|
....|
__|__

Not a lot of people make them like that. Also, I make my 9's like 6's that did a 180-degree turn, and this is the generally accepted standard, except that, for some reason, my school said that they were supposed to look like a lowercase cursive "a" with the tail going straight down for a while instead of curving shortly. I don't care what you say, that's not a nine. That is a balloon on a stick.

What bugs me is people who use vertical lines. I can never tell if it's supposed to be a capital I, a lowercase l, or a 1. | is not a one, it is not an l, and it is not an I. I's have bars on top and bottom, l's have little curvy things on bottom that go up a slight bit, and ones are made with some identifying feature so they don't look like sticks.

-erlc "st1tch ln t1me saves 9" s1eator
Wed 24 May A.D. 2000