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.

[…] wonder what form of numerals (or figures) is correct for the situation at hand? This great tip from FontShop explains it all. Extended typefaces will typically include both oldstyle and lining […]

[…] light-hearted mood in keeping with the subject of the play, but I also needed a font that had oldstyle figures, elegant italics, and a full set of ligatures. Adobe Caslon fit the bill as a full-featured font […]

[…] has a nice little blog post on their blog The FontFeed about understanding when to use Oldstyle Figures, Lining Figures and […]

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.