I’m opposite. I put lines through my 7s always, my Zs less often, and I never put a hat on my Js. The 7s, in particular, is a European habit picked up from my mom and from living out there for awhile.
The line at the top of the capital J is a serif. So are the lines at the top and bottom of the capital I. I was taught in high school art class that (at least when you’re doing lettering in any official capacity) it’s wrong to write them that way if you’re printing in a “font” that is otherwise sans-serif.
When I learned to write, I did all my stuff like it appears on a computer screen. So my nines are upside down sixes, my fours are closed, and my sevens don’t have a line.
Capital J and I sometimes have the lines. I’ve started writing in small caps so it’s actually legible and the ‘capital’ caps have the lines. Sometimes the small caps have a dot.
Zeroes get a slash when I have to distinguish it from Os. Sometimes ones are just a line, sometimes they have the top and the bottom.
My first name starts with a J and I always put the line at the top - and when I sign my name I never use the stupid cursive J, I always put a block capital J followed by the rest of my name in cursive. I also put a line across my sevens, but I learned that in Germany. I never use a line on my Z’s, though.
I cross the 7’s, Z’s, I add the diagonal slash through zero’s, and I add the little flag to my one’s. I have terrible hand writing and without these clues I’d never be able to read what I’ve written. Especially in my engineering/math class notes.
I’ve crossed my sevens ever since college German class. Our teacher explained that it was because ones always have the little upswoop, and so it was to determine which was which - she’d mark us off, actually, if we didn’t upswoop the ones and cross the sevens when numbering our homework answers. I’ve seen some German people’s handwriting where the upswoop is so prominent on the ones that they look like inverted capital Vs.
Caps at the top of Js, always. Crossed Zs, never.
Also, when writing in cursive I include a little hook at the crest of my lower-case 'c’s when they start a word. It’s how I was taught to do it, but I rarely see anyone else use it.
Here is the entry on 0 from the Jargon File, detailing some of the ways numeric zero has been graphically represented by computers:
>it is European to write 1s with a little swoop leading up to the straight line
A few Germans I know write the swoop much bigger than the verticle slope, so it looks like an uppercase Lambda with the left side as much as half again as long as the right side. Since it’s not that rare for a 1 to appear by itself, I often had trouble at first noticing that it was even a character, let alone which one.
Can we get an SDSAB member in here to tell us what that line is called?
My J always has a line across the top, and my 7s have a line through the middle (with a little dangly line at the front top). My Zs look nothing like my 2s though as I loop around the bottom of them instead of coming to a point and straight back.
Like Ghanima I use capital letters in printing, followed by the cursive, for any handwriting I am doing.
I was taught this in Grade 7 Algebra so as to distinguish between 2/z and 1/7. If you’re crazy about this point, so was my math professor.
I use a line through 7 and Z, no hat on my J, a slash through zeroes. I also write a and t the same as they appear in this font, as opposed to most people’s hand writing I’ve seen where a is sort of like o with a little tail, and t is like +. As for the null set, I write that as a very small circle with a large slash through it, or I just use {} instead.
I learned in German class that German 7s were done with the slash, as were Zs. Never heard about the 1s, but saw them written that way by my Belgian pen pals. Since they also wrote their zs and 7s that way, I deduced that it was a European thing.
My youngest son’s name starts with J–of course it has a line across the top.
I learned the Palmer method of cursive. My kids learned D’Nelean (no idea how to spell it). It shapes the letters differently. Perhaps your wife was taught a different method of penmanship?
I despise modern cursive styles. They’re all ugly and awkward. I abandoned it in 4th grade and never looked back, except for that annoying section on the SATs where you had to copy a block of text in cursive for some arcane reason. Something like, “I hereby certify that I am who I claim to be blah blah blah.” They should teach calligraphy instead.
I wasn’t taught to do it, but I write my Zs and 7s with a line through their middles. I don’t need to, as I write both fairly distinctly from the numbers and letters for which they could be mistaken. My Js do not have lines through them. They have long descenders and distinct hooks, so there’s also no mistaking them for anything else.
My handwriting quirk, apparently, is to give distinguishing characteristics to letters and numbers that can’t possibly be mistaken for another, while failing to give distinguishing characteristics to the letters and numbers most likely to be mistaken for others. My Is, 1s, and lowercase Ls are written exactly the same way.
I put diagonal slashes through zeroes only when there is potential for them to be either zeroes or Os: in passwords, software serial numbers, ID numbers, license plantes, etc. I won’t do it for phone numbers or street numbers or anything else entirely numeric.