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Oldstyle tabular figures
María Ramos
Posts: 76
I don't get the point of designing oldstyle tabular numbers. Oldstyle numbers are usually designed for running text, they work better with lowercase letters. And tabular numbers are created for good alignment in columns of stand-alone numbers, I would say lining figures work better in this case. Do type users actually use oldstyle tabular numbers? If so, what do they use it for? Do they have any particular function?
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It is for historical reasons that lining numbers strike us today as the default form and thus oldstyle figs are a special case. But one could argue the opposite, that is, that it is lining figures that only need to be brought out in particular cases. From that point of view the question might be what is the point of lining tabular figures?
As stated above, tabular old style figures are often needed for the table of contents or tabular matter in a text that uses old style figures throughout.
In metal type (including machine-set metal type), all figures were tabular, all cast on the same width. Exceptions were very rare, and then only in display sizes (sometimes only the 1 was narrower). Proportional figures are a recent innovation. For that reason, proportional figure designs that don't look good in tabular settings can look awkward or inappropriate with revival designs.
What sometimes makes tabular figures hard to like is that they're often an accommodation, an afterthought. To make help them succeed, you need to take the tabular setting into consideration at the design level, making sure the figures have well-balanced sidebearings, so they don't make holes or clumps by being too close or too far from their neighbors. Remember, you can't add kerning to these.
If you're making type that will never be used for text, there's no reason to bother with tabular figures of any kind and no sense in altering the figure design to make them work that way.
Thanks for your inputs, I guess it is a matter of style to use them of not.
I didn’t bother with tabular small-cap lining figures, until a thread here (or typophile) convinced me otherwise.
If I’m doing a full-featured OpenType font, I put in all the variants that are options in the InDesign OpenType menu, on the principle that someone somewhere might want them, and feel short-changed if the menu offers the option, but not the font.
And that prompted me down some novel paths, such as old-style figures in a didone typeface (though not the format in Maxim’s example).
However, I don’t go so far as to offer old-style superiors and inferiors!
@Vassil Kateliev comment on the use of old-style tabular numbers for table of contents has convinced me. They probably look good in this context.
Besides that, the concept for the typeface I am creating is "keeping things simple", having a small size typeface family, being efficient. So including characters that are not going to be used it is a big deal.
It's up to the type designer to decide if he wants to "promote" his stylistical/typographical vision, or give designers more rope.
I don't think a typeface's sales will suffer from missing Tabular OSF.
In this totally typical example, the top is the tabular lining figures. The bottom "needing" to go on tabular units for the purposes proposed here, and I don't mean to be argumentative but where did you learn to count to 45?;)
I see that 1,2,3,5 and 7 here would need ruinous help, 8 alone might take 45 minutes.;)
So that suggests 'proportional tabular' numeral sets, i.e. sets with internally consistent common spacing, but proportionally different between the sets based on the typical proportions of the numerals involved. As David's illustration shows, this would imply oldstyle tabular numerals on a narrower width than lining tabular numerals.
Practically, how problematic is this likely to be for typographers? Is it likely that different numeral styles will appear together in a single tabular setting?
This approach, of course, introduces the potential need for oldstyle tabular currency symbols and other characters that might occur in a tabular setting with the numerals.
As I generally feature my latest typeface for Shinntype material, when I made new business cards in 2009, I used Figgins Sans, so, of course, the OSF and SC were put into play.
Hence, María, this is a “proper” use of tabular OSF, because proportional figures for the phone numbers look very wrong in this layout, which it’s not necessary to demonstrate.
In the inventory of the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp one can find the records of the type cast for Christoffel Plantin, cataloged as Volume 153. These records date from Plantin’s life. The page above shows a tabular listing of numbers of cast type. However, the foundry type of the Moyen Canon Romain (Claude Garamont /Hendrik van den Keere) from the inventory of the Museum Plantin-Moretus, which I measured a couple of years ago using a digital caliper, reveals the following values for the widths of the figures:
1: 3,37 mm
2: 4,1 mm
3: 3,67 mm
4: 4,37 mm
5: 3,58 mm
6: 4,62 mm
7: 5,53 mm
8: 4,32 mm
9: 4,22 mm
0: 5,03 mm
This foundry type was most probably cast in the 16th or 17th century –unfortunately the alloy does not contain enough carbon for radiocarbon dating. The x-height of the Gros Canon Romain (for which Van den Keere adapted the length of the ascenders and descenders, which resulted in the Moyen Canon) is roughly 5 mm, so one could consider this a display type.
The set of matrices of Granjon’s Gros Parangon, that may have been justified for fixed registers by Conrad Bernard in 1601, show different widths for the figures set. Gros Parangon type has half the body size of Gros Canon. Casting from these matrices using fixed registers will inevitably also result in different widths for the figures.
As opposed to designing "oldstyle" tabular numbers, Realigning Figures are often a good plan for sans, slab and geometric faces, if one doesn't like the forms of oldstyle numbers. However, when Tabular Realigned Figures are included, to be good for setting contents, addresses and other near-useful things, their workings in forms and tables with their newstyle descenders and widths, tend to look uneven to me, and when these newstyle descenders are not colliding with rules or boxes, it's likely that padding, or linespacing has been manually added to avoid such collisions.
So, what, it takes 4.5 seconds to add space to a user's forms because the glyphs are not vertically efficient for that purpose. But I thought we were talking about designing oldstyle tabular numbers, which I don't like, even on 3/4 of the Tab fig space, not just because of the monetary symbolic struggle that can then ensue, (especially all the way to the 86 monetary symbols, if so required),
but because oldstyle numbers are non-tabular in form, in both dimensions, to work in mixed text and not disturb the use of lowercase. Neither the lack of user ability to make general use for this purpose, or the bastardizations based on the economics of metal glyphs, (thanks for more research and examples Frank), is helped today by making forms that are bad at the original purpose of old style figures, and then made worse for that purpose by tabularity.
So, if you imagine this as a deep issue, from what it's called, to the plethora of uses Type Designers want to argue "oldstyle" tabular numbers are "good for", as opposed to from the point of view of an educator of professional users, "I always ask, "Really?" and/or "What for?".
As you rightly observe, David, there are some problems with oldstyle figures, especially for Americans not familiar with foreign postal codes. But our posties can handle it.
The difficulty, for grotesques, is providing consistency between lining and OSF, with lining calling the shots. In Figgins, I made the bowls of 6 and 9 quite large, which improves legibility in the default lining setting, to the detriment of the OSF. Perhaps I should have changed the proportions radically between the styles. The legibility issues of grot figures carry over from lining into OSF, so this is a bit off topic.
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As you say, consider the professional user.
Max and I have both mentioned situations where tabular OSF can be the preferred style; perhaps niche uses, but shouldn’t we cast a wide net?
And as James M says, most users don’t even access OT features, so it is indeed catering to the professionals to provide umpteen figure variants, because it’s up to those expert users to decide what to do with all the bells and whistles.
Frank, the castings you show are clearly not for text composition—note the huge sidebearings and the absence of kerns on f and the long s. Do you have any idea what they might have been cast for? In any case, Gros Parangon (about 20 pt UK/US) is for very large text, for large folios, not the sort of type one would use for ordinary books.