Text figures

Text figures (sometimes referred to as old-style, hanging, non-lining, minuscule, or medieval figures, digits, or numerals) are a style of Arabic numerals designed for visual harmony with running text . They are known in German as Mediävalziffern ("medieval numerals"), in French as chiffres elzéviriens, in Italian as cifre non allineate or numeri minuscoli, in Spanish as números elzevirianos or cifras de estilo antiguo and in Polish as cyfry nautyczne ("nautical numerals").

Today, numerals are usually printed as lining figures (also called titling figures, ranging figures, or majuscule numerals), which have the same height as capital letters with no descenders.

In text figures, however, the shape and positioning of the numerals varies as it is done for ordinary lowercase letters (minuscules): Some numerals (namely 0, 1 and 2) have neither ascenders nor descenders (hence the same height as the letter "x"), some have ascenders (as an "h", 6 and 8) and some descenders (as a "g", 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9). Though this arrangement of ascenders and descenders is by far the most common, it is not the only possible one. For instance, the types cut by the Didot family of punchcutters and typographers in France, from the late 18th to the early 19th century, typically had an ascending "3", a form that has been preserved in some later French typefaces. A few other typefaces show different arrangements.

One place where you can see text figures is on the United States penny (see the illustration to the left).

As the name medieval numerals implies, text figures have been used since the Middle Ages, when Arabic numerals became common in Europe (in the 12th century). Titling figures, developed by nineteenth-century type designers, largely displaced text figures, especially in newspaper and advertising typefaces. While fine book faces for mechanical typesetting (for the Monotype and Linotype machines, for example) still used text numerals well into the 20th century, with the advent of phototypesetting they all but disappeared. With digital typography they have had a strong comeback.

High-quality typesetting prefers text figures in running text : they meld better with the lower case (and with small capitals), and their greater variety of shape facilitates reading. Lining figures are, however, called for in the midst of upper-case type, and they sometimes are said to work better in tables and spreadsheets.

Although many traditional fonts included a complete set of each kind of numbers — for use in various settings — most standard computer typefaces (except those used by professional printers) today include only one or the other. Lining figures are probably still more common; among the currently common fonts which feature text figures instead are Georgia font family ([1]) and Hoefler Text .

References

• Robert Bringhurst. The Elements of Typographic Style. Vancouver: Hartley & Marks, 1992. ISBN 0-88179-132-6.

External links

• Multilingual Typographic Dictionary - typographic lexicon in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.