1. Text Figures (old-style numbers)

This is the first of a 10-part series of the Ten Keys to Seamless Typesetting.

When I started typesetting professionally, it was in the days of DOS, Gem and Windows 3.11. Black and white monitors were preferred over colour because the resolution was far better.

However, Desktop Publishing or DTP as it became known allowed for a WYSIWYG experience unknown before. No longer did you have to spend £5 (and this was in 1992) to see the output of one page.

I used Ventura on GEM, PageMaker on Windows and Quark on the Mac. Scripting was a case of using the Windows recorder to record your actions, and I would greek the page to speed up the “script” three-fold.

There was one huge drawback with many DTP fonts in those days: common 8-bit encodings limited the accessible character set to 256 positions. Extra ligatures, small caps and alternative figures often had to be supplied in separate expert fonts. Which characters were readily available also depended on the platform and software.

I remember a year or so later getting my first “expert font.” This second font contained a complete set of ligatures and a full set of numbers of the base font. However, there were many problems using expert fonts in those days. The main one is that it would take the RIP forever to process the postscript file.

However, OpenType greatly expanded the available glyph repertoire and made it easier to access genuine small caps, superiors, ligatures and alternative figures within one font. The format is not unlimited, and each font still needs to contain the particular glyphs and features you want to use.

There are essentially four sets of numbers (ignoring superscripts etc.) that we need to deal with. Just like the letters of the alphabet, we have uppercase numbers and lowercase numbers. The former are more properly known as “titling figures,” or “lining figures,” and the latter are known as “text figures” or “old-style figures” (OSF for short). We will use Adobe InDesign’s naming convention of lining and old-style figures for clarity, although I prefer “text figures”.

However, numbers are often put in tables, so a well-equipped text family may offer tabular as well as proportional versions of both lining and old-style figures. Tabular figures share the same width, helping numerical columns align.

However, it is curious that although the least-used set would be tabular lining numbers – used for setting with capitals in a table – it was chosen for most of the fonts of DTP systems of 30 years ago.

So for many years, we became used to seeing the number 11 with a large space between the numbers and of course, they were in all caps.

Looking at the table on the right, you can see in column A; the numbers align nicely because tabular figures have been used. However, in column B, proportional figures have been used, which makes for a messy table.

In the example below, the first line uses proportional old-style figures, my usual preference for continuous text. The second uses tabular lining figures. Notice the wider spacing in 11 and the full-height figures: the two settings give the line a different rhythm.

Clearly, tabular figures are useful for aligned numerical columns, while proportional old-style figures often blend more comfortably with lower-case running text. “Ranging figures” is another term for lining figures, so it should not be used here to mean old-style figures.

Although OpenType has been around since the 1990s, the font and software settings still determine which figures readers see. Modern web typography also supports old-style and proportional figures when the font provides them. The illustrations show the distinctions that the web editor used for the original version of this post could not reproduce in its running text.

---

If you have a manuscript that you wish to be typeset seamlessly with classic old-style figures, then contact us for a no-obligation discussion by clicking here.

I am looking forward to your comments below!​