Re: Old-style figures throughout the document

["William F. Adams" <wadams@atlis.com>]

Idris asked me about this during the previous thread, before I'd joined 
this list.

Here's a slightly edited version of my reply about osf in documents 
with math:

Well, I did the second-pass macros, and most of the math markup / 
editing of a recent translation of Thomas Harriot's _Artis Analyticae 
Praxis_ from 1631 or so, and it (of course) uses old style figures 
exclusively, pre-dating them, as would any mathematics (or other) text 
before the latter part of the 19th century.

Old-style figures are named thusly since the now standard alternative 
lining figures are a fairly recent invention --- a Victorian (some 
would say debased) convention born out of expedience and a desire for 
better looking tabular material --- many railed against them, Charles 
Babbage being a notable example of the opposition to them (noting that 
in tables of logarithms, when used in difficult circumstances (I 
believe the example was an artillery officer doing ballistic 
calculations) absolute unambiguous representation could be a matter of 
life and death and that the extra differentiation provided by ascenders 
and descenders in numbers was highly desirable --- can't recall if Dr. 
Asaf Degani revisited this with his NASA reports on typography or no 
--- if not, he should've).

Bringhurst's prescription (in his _Elements of Typographic Style) is 
perhaps a bit simplistic and doesn't acknowledge the typographical 
palette which has since become readily available in newer fonts 
(Hoefler Text in Mac OS X for example affords one proportional lining 
figures, monospaced lining figures, proportional old-style figures and 
lining old-style figures --- a text typeface I've been working on goes 
this even better, adding three-quarter height proportional and 
monospaced figures, and French versions of the old-style figure 
versions as well).

Bringhurst's rule 3.2.3 would seem a better arbiter, ``Refer 
typographical disputes to the higher courts of speech and thinking.''.

Knuth, in ``Typesetting Concrete Mathematics'' (_Digital Typography_, 
pg. 369) has a cogent observation when he writes, ``This experience 
proved to be worthwhile because it taught me that there is a useful and 
meaningful distinction between text numerals and mathematical 
numbers.''

There's been some discussion of old-style figures for mathematics on 
comp.text.tex, but I don't think any absolute statement could 
reasonably be made. It's certainly valid that using lining figures for 
mathematics does provide a useful distinction (and it also greatly 
eases typographic issues such as the placement of super and 
sub-scripts), but the counter-argument that mathematics is a valid 
textual discussion form is certainly appropriate as well.

Arguably this would be a good place to use Bruce Roger's ``allusive 
typography'' principle. Anything set in a design more recent than 
Baskerville should use of lining figures in the absence of a reason 
not, while older texts could consider the use of old-style figures if 
concerns such as super and sub script placement can be worked out. But 
perhaps even that's too simplistic and formulaic.

A far more productive thing probably would be to look at actual sample 
pages to consider things in context (sorry, couldn't resist the pun).

Anyway, I hope this helps somewhat and is of use in your consideration.

William

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William Adams, publishing specialist
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