On Oct 22, 2006, at 2:58 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote:
You're conflating two different things. Most (all?) proportional fonts do not have fixed-width numbers, but they do have numbers that are a uniform height, and that's the look I'm defending.
They are indeed two separate issues. I'm mostly to blame for the conflation of the two, with my remark about columns of numbers lining up.
I used to do professional typesetting in the 1980s -- ie, when the typesetting machines were computerized but before home word processing as we know it. With the fonts we had then, it was commonplace for a proportional-width font to have numerals that were uniform width (always 1 en), precisely so that numbers would line up. (Certain other characters could be relied upon to be exactly 1 en or 1 em: spaces, dashes, bullets, leader dots.) Many typefaces were available in either two versions, one with the uniform numbers and one without (and usually some other minor variations, eg, swashes vs technical characters to fill the extra slots).
I assume there must be something similar today. Just as an experiment I just now took a look at Adobe Garamond, which is not a monospace font by any means, and yet the numerals characters are all of uniform width. Probably they do that by default but there are glyphs that space them with variable widths.
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