Typophile

Fonts with old style tabular figures

ryanholmes

I am looking for a typeface(s) with tabular old style figures. Not one or the other as separate fonts, but tabular AND OsF. It seems like everything I come across with tabular figures, they are lining, and every old style figure is proportional, and I can't figure a way to easily search for this feature. Any suggestions?

If there are more examples than I'm aware of, the application is for a lengthy academic journal, so a serif (or perhaps, sans serif) suitable for use as lengthy body copy is a requirement.

Most OpenTtype FontFonts have oldstyle tabular figures. Here are a few serif text faces with direct links to the tabular figs in their character set:

FF Meta Serif
FF Maiola
FF Nexus
FF Scala
FF Holmen
FF Celeste
FF Eureka

And there are plenty of Adobe fonts with these figs too:

Utopia
Warnock
Minion

In the near future, you will be able to search FontShop.com by OpenType feature.

Thanks Stephen--but I should have qualified my question by asking about Type 1's only, since work is done by several folks in non-OT-savvy Mac apps (eg, MS Word). Or an "OT" font without OT features, which has been converted from its Type 1 parent.

Bodoni Egyptian (roman & italic, reg. & bold)
Oneleigh (roman only, all weights)

Check the PS versions of those fonts then. Many of them still have TOSF.

I'm curious, though. What sort of work is being done in Word that requires these figures?

…pasting in tables from Excel? Then the print out you hand out at your meeting are easier to read?

IMO, tables are almost always better set in lining figs, unless you're doing something novelty or decorative.

I think that tables that have columns with text mixed with columns with figures (but not columns that have both text and figures…) work best with TOSF.

Exactly Dan; good call.

Overlooked that situation. Thanks, Dan.

If you're making a numbered list, tabular figures are necessary--whether oldstyle or lining.
If you have a column of phone numbers (say on a business card--even if only two numbers), tabular figures make it so much neater.
Price lists, dates, contents pages, recipes, etc.
Wherever one or more numbers appears flush above another, then you should use tabular figures.
And in those situations, why not have the option of old style figures?

Captured from web.archive.org on 13 Mar 2015. view this capture