the case for numerals

March 5, 2009 ‒ 8:57 pm

In the 18th century, font designers started to cut an additional set of uppercase numerals for inclusion in their typefaces. Uppercase letters have something more in common than just marking proper nouns or the beginning of sentences – they all take up the same amount of vertical space between two lines:

Uppercase numerals are well suited to a handful of uses, such as APPEARING 1234567890 IN CAPITALIZED TEXT or displaying the price of gas. But the rest of the time, we deserve the pleasure of of seeing their lowercase homologues since they were designed to be read within the flow 1234567890 of predominately lowercase text.

I set my blog in a typeface which offers both kind of numerals (the ones shown in the picture above, actually). But, woefully, there is no way to present lowercase numeric forms to readers of my web pages. There’s no CSS attribute allowing me to do that. Instead, I have to use the numerals from another typeface which offers lowercase numerals by default (and has no uppercase numerals, as far as I know).

It’s a rather silly state of affairs when you consider how many eyeballs are regularly reading text on the internet. Cinderella is waiting right now in the data of many typefaces while we look at her ugly step sisters. We need CSS to play the prince.

Update March 24, 2010: A ray of hope! John Daggett of Mozilla has drafted an excellent w3c proposal for font presentation in css3. In would, among other things, enable old style text figures. Wonderful! Hope we get to see it in a near future release of Firefox.

Update Update December 3, 2010: Looks like this will be offered in Firefox 4!

❧