Can tabular numbers be a default set?

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Eimantas Paškonis
Eimantas Paškonis Posts: 91
in Type Design Technique & Theory
I know they can technically, but can they practically? As in – is it frowned upon?
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Comments

  • Bhikkhu Pesala
    Bhikkhu Pesala Posts: 210
    I think most fonts have tabular figures as the default. Times New Roman and Arial do, Georgia has Proportional figures. 
  • Eimantas Paškonis
    Eimantas Paškonis Posts: 91
    > Times New Roman and Arial do

    Wow, TIL
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 1,001
    I wouldn’t say “most,” these days. There are some. The practice is certainly not unprecedented.
    I think most of those that you will find with default tabular figures derive from or inherit from fonts conceived in previous technologies. It was not uncommon in hot metal fonts from Linotype and Monotype. For example, the Monotype “C” matrix-case had all figures on 9-unit widths.
    But I would venture to say that designers in the digital generation conceive of figures as proportional foremost, and thus fonts designed natively in this era generally have proportional figures as default and tabular figures as a secondary consideration.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,284
    These days, I generally make the default for text fonts tabular.
    But I see no reason to do so for display styles.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,460
    The frequency of tabular settings is much less than normal settings.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,022
    Adobe long had a rule that virtually all Adobe fonts needed to have tabular figures as the default. This was questioned, but left unchanged, in the early years of OpenType. I don’t know if it was ever revisited.

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