On 23 Oct 2006 at 18:24, Mark D Lew wrote:
> Both of the experts I consulted confirmed that numerals with
> descenders ("oldstyle") are the original forms. My brother (who really
> is a type historian) tells me that the numerals without descenders
> ("lining") were introduced in the late 1700s in Britain, whence they
> spread to the continent and eventually became standard, well before
> the computer age.
> He believes that fixed-width numerals ("tabular") were introduced
> simultaneous with lining, though he can't document that for certain.
I was not claiming that computers introduced fixed-width numbers,
since that would be absurd (since typewriters had always had them),
only that computers introduced the *limitation* to fixed-width
numbers by offering fonts that didn't include any alternatives.
If I'm not mistaken, most desktop publishers worth their salt had
fonts with the more traditional numbers and used them. I can remember
editing art gallery catalogs back in 1993-94 where the main font was
Galliard and while the Galliard knock-off font we had on our Windows
3.x computers didn't have the proportional numbers with descenders,
the designer who was doing the publishing layout was producing
layouts with the appropriate numeric characters. She obviously had an
appropriate version of Galliard for professional typesetting.
But for garden-variety usage, we lacked them -- at that point I'd be
surprised if any TrueType fonts included the non-fixed-width
numerals.
--
David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com
David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/
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