When would tab­u­lar old­style fig­ures be the right choice? At first sight, it seems they’re a redun­dant com­bi­na­tion.

Great ques­tion, John. Tab­u­lar old­style is cer­tainly the least common vari­ant. I guess it would be appro­pri­ate if you wanted to create colum­nar data that was a little more orna­men­tal or “old style” as it were. It’s more of an aes­thetic choice in that instance.

I’ll ask the tech­ni­cal ques­tion - how do I make my appli­ca­tion use each type of fig­ures?

Tab­u­lar old­style might work well in a restau­rant or pub menu, for the prices. Or for tour­na­ment sports score­sheet columns — darts or golf league. Some sit­u­a­tion where you want an old-​timey or dec­o­ra­tive feel but need num­bers aligned in a grid.

Thanks for the great arti­cle! It never quite stuck with me why old­style fig­ures vary in height and posi­tion, but read­ing that they “har­mo­nize with other words on a page” has made every­thing clear.

Thanks for the con­cise yet very infor­ma­tive post! This is one of the daily things we tend to over­look, thanks for explain­ing it :)

Excel­lent arti­cle! I was won­der­ing, could you per­haps rec­om­mend some inex­pen­sive fonts for per­sonal use? I already have the Adobe Type Clas­sics for Learn­ing, but I want more! ;)

A couple of weeks ago I uncov­ered my old Macmil­lan log tables from the 70s and the ques­tion about “tab­u­lar old­style” made me go and fish them out of the recy­cling bin. As I sus­pected, the bodies of the tables are all in tab­u­lar old­style. I sup­pose this could have been delib­er­ate, to give read­ers a visual cue as they wan­dered through the blocks of oth­er­wise undis­tin­guished fig­ures. Look­ing at the dates for this book though, it’s a 1970 reprint of an 1908 edi­tion so I wonder if old­style fig­ures might have been the only option a hun­dred years?

When I design a more traditional-​looking pub­li­ca­tion and use old­style fig­ures, I will use their pro­por­tional vari­ant in the text, and tab­u­lar vari­ant in the table of con­tents. If there are other tables, too, espe­cially ones with lots of num­bers, I will prob­a­bly go tab­u­lar lining.

Meta Pro might have been a better choice for illus­trat­ing the dif­fer­ences here. I believe its tab­u­lar lining numer­als have styl­is­tic dif­fer­ences (like a foot on the “1”) to com­pen­sate for the uni­form spac­ing.

i found this on delicious- thanks so much for the brief intro- i actu­ally learned some­thing great- and will chew on it for the next days…

I’ve been told that lining numer­als should also be used when the sur­round­ing text is all in cap­i­tals. But I imag­ine that this applies only for “simple cap­i­tals”, and that for small-​caps, which don’t align, old-​style numer­als are better. Any thoughts?

Thank you all for your com­ments and per­sonal addi­tions to the arti­cle.

@ Cameron Bales: That depends on which appli­ca­tion you’re using. If you’re in Adobe CS apps or Quark 7, it’s easy to access figure styles from Open­Type fonts via the Open­Type menu. In other appli­ca­tions, you’ll want to use Post­Script or True­Type fonts, each one of which has a dif­fer­ent figure style. That’s what the “TF” or “OSF” means in some font names.

@ Russel Gorton : That’s right. I for myself like to use TOSF usu­ally for smaller list­ings with no more than ten rows. Finally all these tips in my arti­cle are not laws and the cor­rect use depends on the designer and con­tent.

@ Dan Vil­liom Pod­laski Chris­tiansen: The Adobe Fonts def­i­nitely are a good start. You can see our per­sonal rec­om­men­da­tions in the Staff Picks list. You will also find some very good hand-​picked Open­Type fonts on our new Open­Type page.

@ Amar: I totally agree. You also should use lining fig­ures in an upper­case sur­round­ing.

I’ve been taking some courses in typog­ra­phy, and I am being taught that if old style fig­ures are not avail­able in a font (as in the “Mother Teresa” text exam­ple above), that I should drop the point size of the lining fig­ures by about 10% so that they look better (i.e., not so promi­nent).
Any com­ments?
This is counter-​intuitive to me; I can see the dif­fer­ence, though slight, in the weight of the face.

Your intu­ition is cor­rect. Adjust­ing the pt size is not a good idea because you’re always going to get a weight dif­fer­en­tial. How notice­able it is depends on the type­face, but in gen­eral the lighter weighted num­bers will be as much (if not more) as a dis­trac­tion as the tall num­bers.

This isn’t exactly rel­e­vant, but — the recipe exam­ple should have aligned the num­bers flush right and the words for each ingre­di­ent flush left, with a nice em space between the two columns. This was usu­ally done in cook­books, back in the day. The big cook­ing mags — Bon Appetit, Gourmet, and Food and Wine — still do.

And, as long as I’m here… while read­ing text set in a serif face, I still come across num­bers, espe­cially dates, set in lining fig­ures but with a low­er­case letter l in place of the figure 1. The two kern dif­fer­ently, and the letter is often taller and lighter than the figure. I think that’s a holdover from, again, back in the day, when many type­writ­ers didn’t have a number 1. We were taught to sub­sti­tute the letter. Are most of the people inputting copy over 50?