Proportional vs. Tabular Numbers

Joon Park

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.

Stephen Coles

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

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.

Stephen Coles

Go proportional then. I think tabular became the default default because foundries simply followed the lead of system fonts, but it makes little sense for a display typeface to have tabular by default. One exception is control panels, gauges, countdowns, or other readouts where you want to maintain a constant width as the display changes. 

Nick Shinn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.