It occurred to us recently that we’ve seen increasing instances of old-style figures (lowercase, non-lining numbers) in graphic design in the past few years. Typographers have always used text figures, but graphic designers have been largely ignorant of them owing, in part, to the lack of affordable extended font families in the early years of the desktop revolution.
Matthew Carter designed Georgia in 1996 for Microsoft’s Web Core Fonts program, and it’s now all over the internet. Why? Because it was included (wisely) in the system software for both Macs and PCs. Web designers use system fonts for all live type (type which has not been converted into a graphic) so that default fonts (think Courier) will not stand in as substitutes for specified fonts.
Georgia has handsome old-style figures, and this has renewed interest in non-lining numbers amongst designers.
Thank you Matthew Carter, and (dare I say it?) thank you Microsoft.
Fascinating post. Twenty years ago when ‘desktop publishing’ was in its infancy, I worked on a Mac with what would now seem like the most laughably tiny amount of disk space. One of my regular jobs was a 400pp volume of Law Reports set in Monotype Bembo, with old-style numbers using Pagemaker version 3 or something. The old-style numbers had to be bought (over the counter in a shop – nobody was online in those days) as a completely separate font, and when the job got to a certain stage, I would have to set up the Mac to search and replace all the Bembo numbers with old-style Bembo numbers and it would take about an hour and half to chunter through them all!!! One forgets how it all started, sometimes, and how very far we’ve come in a relatively short space of time!
I wonder how one would “find and replace” numerals in one font with numerals of another?
Oh it was easy. Find and replace all the 1s. Find and replace all the 2s. Find and replace all the 3s. (You can probably see a pattern emerging here . . .) It would only take about 15 minutes per search and we thought we were the bees knees for being able to do it (the client had hummed and ha’d about letting their precious job being typeset by this newfangled method because they though old-style figs would be beyond us so the onus was on us to prove them wrong). Needless to say, our old-fashioned DTP methods have now been superseded by in-house automated typesetting and we were unceremoniously dumped! That’s progress, folks!
D’oh! That’s so very logical, but it didn’t occur to me.
I bought a book of essays last week which, when I started reading it I discovered, had lining numerals. I felt as though I’d purchased a defective product.