Most of my bread-and-butter fonts are broken. So is my keyboard. I can still use them but they’re broken because they don’t work as they should, or as I want them to.
Between the two of them they’re breaking my user interface and interfering with my ability to communicate. Here’s why:
Modern (lining), old-style & small caps numerals
All of the core Web fonts apart from Georgia have modern numerals. They are all equal width, and the same height as capital letters. They are great for tabular data because they line up vertically in tables which is probably their raison d’etre. They work perfectly with capitals, too. After that they start to fail. Miserably.
For my purposes, I’ve use two of the core Web fonts—both excellent in their own way—that were designed by Matthew Carter as examples.
These are the modern numerals of Verdana:
Old-style numerals have variable widths, just like regular letters. The numbers are mostly the same height as the lowercase letters with descenders and ascenders that fall and rise from that beat. They are perfect for use within text, or anywhere outside of the two examples used for modern numerals. They are beautiful, harmonious, easier to read and I want to use them, all the time.
This is Georgia:
Small caps numerals are equally beautiful and, as the name suggests, relate to the size of the small capital. Also, small caps are not just shrunken uppercase letters, and may not fit to the lowercase x-height so numerals can be drawn separately.
There’s more detailed comparisons and great examples in John D Berry’s Creative Pro article.
The only problem I’ve come across with old-style numbers is telling the difference between a zero and a letter "o". This hit me when creating the business cards for Grow. My answer was to commit sacrilege and draw an asymmetric line through the zero in the knowledge that letterpress techniques would deboss the faux small caps heavily almost to the weight of a proper small caps font, and the line would clearly differentiate the zero from the "o".
Every typeface with upper and lowercase letters should have modern and old-face numerals.
They are both needed. However, I mostly type two kinds of text: prose and code. If you ignore the code for a second, I would guess that almost all of the people using an alphabet where old-style is useful are typing prose more often than not. In prose, depending on the type (technical, academic, business etc) there are rules about the use of numbers. Thirty dollars will get you access to chapter 13 of The Chicago Manual of Style or you can also see the Connecticut Community College guide to numbers and lists, and Jack Lynch’s Guide to Grammar and Style.
Whatever the house style we lean towards, old-style numerals should be available to use. Typographers and designers, please include them in every possible face. I realise that would be pointless unless everyone could use them easily with common software. Therefore, operating system and user interface designers, please give us access to them via a keystroke or two. There’s no easy way to access them right now, even if they exist (unless you edit the typeface itself to swap lining for old-style permanently.) This I can say with complete confidence:
My keyboard is busted
The number row on this shiny new Mac keyboard lists all modern numbers with symbols above them, just like yours.
It’s busted in two ways:
- If a typeface has modern and old-style numerals I can’t type them both easily. It should be as easy as typing in uppercase or lowercase, which is exactly what it is.
- When writing code I use certain symbols a lot and therefore use shift a lot. In fact, with Mac keyboard the most common symbol I type after angle brackets is the hash (or pound in the States): “#”. This is accessed via pressing Alt+3. There is no hint on the key itself. When I switched to a Mac for the first time, I once spent a good amount of time on a train cursing before working it out.
An answer
I freely confess I’m opening a can of worms here, and could go into great detail about the various use-cases and modes our keyboards should have. However, that will be for another day. For now I’m offering this simple way operating systems can enable everyone to use old-style numbers without re-mapping the keys:
- Give my keyboard access to old-style numerals by default using the existing keystrokes. If they are not available, default to whatever numerals are available.
- If modern or lining numbers are also available, give me access to them in the same way that I have access to other capitals: via shift.
- Provide access to symbols with a different key. You decide, I don’t mind, but Alt seems obvious. Seriously, who uses ^ on a daily basis? The even less-used symbols should be moved to a double or triple action key configuration.
If this is all too much of an ask, then at least allow everyone to access old-style numerals with an obvious set of keystrokes that won’t interupt writing flow too much.
Does this solution make sense to anyone else? There may be problems I haven’t foreseen with the technical or interface aspects, and there’s much I’d like to add about code mode. However, right now I’d just love easy access to old-style numerals, both for the sake of my eyes when I’m reading and my heart when I’m writing.
6 Comments
1. By Fernando Figoni on 10th Dec ’07 at 21:21pm
2. By Ian on 13th Dec ’07 at 11:46am
3. By dotjay on 13th Dec ’07 at 14:54pm
4. By Lee Anne Phillips on 17th Dec ’07 at 14:10pm
6. By Paul Walker on 26th Jan ’08 at 12:37pm