Text figures

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Hoefler Text, a contemporary font, uses hanging or "old style" text figures.

In typography, text figures also known as or old-style, ranging, non-lining or medieval figures or numerals, are digits descended from Hindu-Arabic numerals. The ascending and descending forms of text figures help differentiate each numeral, and are thought to make them more legible than lining figures and integrate them with lowercase text.^{[verification needed]}

For the past two hundred years lining numerals (figures of consistent height with no ascending or descending forms) have become increasingly common, but since the mid-late 1990's, a revival of text figures has steadily gained prominence.

A vintage absinthe advertisement showing the "French" style of text figures.

In text figures, the shape and positioning of the numerals varies as in lowercase letters. In the most common scheme, 0, 1, and 2 are x-height, having neither ascenders nor descenders; 6 and 8 have ascenders; and 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9 are descending forms. Other schemes exist as well; for example, the types cut by the Didot family of punchcutters and typographers in late eighteenth to early nineteenth century France typically had an ascending 3 to prevent confusion with the cursive letter z, a form preserved in some later French typefaces. A few other typefaces used different arrangements.

High-quality typesetting prefers text figures in body text: they integrate better with lowercase letters and small capitals, and their greater variety of shape facilitates reading. They help accomplish consistent typographic colour in blocks of text, unlike runs of lining figures which can distract the eye. Lining figures are called for in all-capitals settings (hence the name titling figures), and may work better in tables and spreadsheets.

Although many traditional fonts included a complete set of each kind of numbers, most digital fonts today (except those used by professional printers) include only one or the other. Lining figures remain more common. The few common digital fonts with default text figures include Georgia,^[1] Hoefler Text and, among the Category:Windows Vista typefaces, Candara, Constantia and Corbel.

Text figures are known in German as Mediävalziffern (“medieval numerals”), in French as chiffres elzéviriens and in Spanish as números elzevirianos, and in Polish as cyfry nautyczne (“nautical numerals”).

[edit] History

The ascending six and descending nines are clearly seen on this 1996 US penny

As the name medieval numerals implies, text figures have been in use since the Middle Ages, when Arabic numerals reached twelfth century Europe, where they 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 new font for type founder John Bell, which included three-quarter height lining figures. They were further developed by nineteenth century type designers, and largely displaced text figures in some contexts, such as newspaper and advertising typography.

The use of text figures suffered further setbacks in the twentieth century, amid attempts to do away with typographic case altogether, and they became rarer still with the advent of phototypesetting.^{[citation needed]} Fine book faces for mechanical typesetting still used text numerals well into the twentieth century, and with digital typography text figures are making a strong comeback.

Text figures have not yet achieved a formal slot in the standard Unicode table. However, some expansive font families include text figures in their character set; for instance, Adobe's "Pro" fonts set the text figures 0–9 in the range U+F643 to U+F64C of the "Private Use" area of Unicode.