Text figures
Text figures (also known as non-lining, lowercase, old style,[1] ranging, hanging, medieval, billing,[2] or antique[3] figures or numerals) are numerals designed with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the name. They are contrasted with lining figures (also called titling or modern figures), which are the same height as upper-case letters.[4][5] Georgia is an example of a popular typeface that employs text figures by default.
Design
In text figures, the shape and positioning of the numerals vary as those of
High-quality
Although many conventional typefaces have both types of numerals in full, early digital fonts only had one or the other (with the exception of those used by professional printers). Modern OpenType fonts generally include both, and being able to switch via lnum
and onum
feature tags.[8] The few common digital fonts that default to using text figures include Candara, Constantia, Corbel, Hoefler Text, Georgia, Junicode, some variations of Garamond (such as the open-source EB Garamond), and FF Scala. Palatino and its clone FPL Neu support both text and lining figures.[9][10][11]
History
As the name medieval numerals implies, text figures have been in use since the Middle Ages, when Arabic numerals reached 12th century Europe, where they eventually supplanted Roman numerals.
Lining figures came out of the new middle-class phenomenon of shopkeepers’ hand-lettered signage. They were introduced to European typography in 1788, when Richard Austin cut a
While always popular with fine printers, text figures became rarer still with the advent of phototypesetting and early digital technologies with limited character sets and no support for alternate characters.[14] Walter Tracy noted that they were avoided by phototypesetting manufacturers since (not being of even height) they could not be miniaturised to form fraction numerals, requiring an additional set of fraction characters.[6] They made a comeback with more advanced digital typesetting systems.[15]
Modern professional digital fonts are almost universally in one or another variant of the
See also
References
- ^ University of Chicago Press (2010). "Appendix B: Glossary". The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 891, 899.
- ^ Birdsall 2004, p. xi
- ^ Birdsall 2004, p. 186
- ^ Bringhurst 1992, p. 36
- ^ Saller, Carol (March 14, 2012). "Old-Style Versus Lining Figures". Lingua Franca. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
- ^ a b c d Tracy, Walter. Letters of Credit. pp. 67–70.
- ^ Bergmann, Christoph; Hardwig, Florian (23 August 2016). "Zero vs. oh: Strategies of glyph differentiation". Isoglosse. Retrieved 12 September 2016.
- ^ "Registered features - definitions and implementations". Microsoft. February 14, 2017. Retrieved April 24, 2018.
- ^ Devroye, Luc (November 30, 2002). "More on the Palatino Story".
- ^ Index of /~was/x/FPL Archived April 15, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ (URW)++ Design & Development; Puga, Diego; Stubner, Ralf (March 13, 2008). "FPL Neu Fonts—OpenType Edition". Archived from the original on April 25, 2012.
- ^ a b Hansard, Thomas Curson (1825). Typographia, an Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Printing. pp. 430–1. Retrieved 12 August 2015.
- .
- ^ Bringhurst 1992, p. 47
- ^ Hoefler, Jonathan. "Hoefler Text: design notes". Hoefler & Co. Retrieved 24 May 2019.
- ISBN 978-1-936213-22-1. Retrieved 24 May 2019.
Some variations of decimal digits are considered glyph variants and are not separately encoded. These include the old style variants of digits, as shown in Figure 22-7.
- ^ Personal communication from Thomas Phinney, formerly of Adobe Type
Works cited
- ISBN 0-300-10347-6.
- ISBN 0-88179-132-6.
External links
- Bergsland, David. "Using Numbers in the Proper Case". DT&G Design. Archived from the original on June 21, 2012.