On Friday 06 May 2005 09:06, David Wilson wrote:
1. I had a professor who tried to teach us to write the digit 1 with the serif extended to the baseline, like a very narrow upper case lambda. Ostensibly this was easier to write and gave the digit 1 more body than a single stroke. Has anyone ever heard of this technique of writing the digit 1?
It's common in France, I think.
2. I was also at some point taught to add a short downstroke at the end of the vinculum in a radical sign, which ostensibly better demarcates the argument. I still do this. Has anyone ever heard of this technique?
I do it too.
3. Printed fonts in which the digits are all h-height and rest on the baseline seem to be fairly old, for example, I have a facsimile version of a 1611 King James Bible in which all of the digits are equal h-height. This seems to be fairly universal in modern fonts.
However, there are printed fonts from the 19th and early 20th century, and probably earlier, in which 0, 1, and 2 are x-height; 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9 descend below the baseline, and 6 and 8 reach up to h-height. In my old book collection, I have several books in which the page numbers are printed using this sort of font, including a reprint of Vega's 1856 logarithmic and trigonometric tables, in which the preface uses equal-height digits, while the tables have a mix of equal-height and ascending and descending digits. I find the ascending and descending digits very beautiful and I wondered if anyone might have a font with such digits. If anyone is interested, I will scan an image of a page of Vega's tables for an example.
There are many. Such numerals are sometimes called "oldstyle" in contrast to the now commoner "lining" numerals. Some typefaces have both kinds of digits available; for digital fonts there's sometimes an "expert" version that includes oldstyle digits and various other typographically useful things. If you're a TeX user, you can get oldstyle numerals by saying $\oldstyle 0123456789$. -- g