Proportional vs. Tabular Numbers

Joon Park
Joon Park Posts: 56
in Technique and Theory
I am currently debating which (proportional or tabular) style numbers to keep it as default unicode and make the latter as an option.

Any recommendation? I noticed some of popular fonts with both has tabular style glyphs as default. Although I feel proportional numbers are more used in general.

Comments

  • Stephen Coles
    Stephen Coles Posts: 1,008
    It all depends on the style of your typeface and its intended usage. How often will the fonts be used for tables or in office environments?
  • Joon Park
    Joon Park Posts: 56
    Probably not often enough, it's mainly designed to be used for headline. Condensed geometric style, plus space in tabular style look bit out of place next to other texts.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,216
    It’s notable that the default figures of Georgia are proportional and oldstyle.
    Verdana’s are tabular and lining.

    As Stephen notes, the default style depends on the typeface in question, and even the style. 

    IMO, a display face should have proportional lining figures.
  • Maxim Zhukov
    Maxim Zhukov Posts: 74
    It’s notable that the default figures of Georgia are proportional and oldstyle.
    Is it of any significance that in the early version of Georgia the figures were neither oldstyle nor lining?


  • attar
    attar Posts: 209
    Tabular became the default in the pre-OpenType days and I think it's because of a one-size-fits-all kind of thing: tabular looks half-decent in text setting AND can be used for tables (even tho table use is so sparse).
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,229
    Default tabular numerals are a good example of the circumstances of restrictive requirements taking precedence over the circumstances of frequency.

    Personally, I wish we had a font technology in which there was no such thing as a default numeral style, and instead recognised that numeral style and spacing is always conditional.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,216
    How would that be possible?

    **

    On a related point, I designed a newspaper typeface where the default was proportional, for body text, and also provided an alternate font with default tabular figures (not even an OpenType feature), for the stock price tables; however, they used the default font default figures (proportional) there—either because they didn’t “get” it, or had some weird technical constraint, or because they thought proportional figures looked classier, or some such thing. Go figure.
  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,436
    How would that be possible?

    Maybe it could be a software rule, similar to how smart quote substitutions are handled by software. If numerals* on a line aren't preceded by alphabetics and follow a line of other numerals which also aren't preceded by alphabetics, make the numerals in both lines tabular. Unless those alphabetics are identical on both lines. Otherwise, make them proportional.

    And then treat tabs as if they were new lines. That way you could do something like Phone[tab]555-2368[break]Mobile[tab]555-0113

    * Including mathematical symbols, currency and such.


  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,229
    edited November 2015
    I wasn't suggesting a heuristic approach to numeral style and spacing, although that is certainly possible with the usual caveats about heuristics (as soon as you have a heuristic, you need a mechanism to correct the outcome of the heuristic). What I'm thinking of is an approach that always requires the user to make a conscious decision about numeral style, or to set the default to his or her own preference, rather than having a dumb default provided by the font cmap table. It's probably too complicated a thing to build on top of the mess of inconsistency we've constructed over the past decades, but it's the only thing that makes sense to me: why have font makers force a default when all uses are conditional and the font maker can't know the users' conditions?
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,216
    Nonetheless, it is unlikely that a display font would be used for tabular work.

    Similarly, given that tabular settings are a very small amount of the total of typesetting, surely it makes sense to have proportional figures as the default. Isn’t that the logic behind Georgia’s figures (Microsoft edition)? 

    You might just as well require users decide between lower case and small caps. 

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