Okay, I have just visited Thomas Phinney's blog "Typblography" and read Confused by "a" and "o" ordinals? and I am still confused.
I understand that the ords are used in Spanish and Portuguese in a similar manner as English ordinals but I still have questions about the vertical positioning.

ChrisL

Just use something that looks okay visually in your font. This is like asking if the acute accents should be more vertical or horizontal or if the dot of the umlaut should be in line with the i. The answer is Yes and No at the same time :)

Spanish also uses -er and, much less commonly, -os and -as. There was a thread back a while ago asking if there was a way to automagically figure this out and the result was that for some languages like Russian it's impossible because of declensions.

In my current text font I'm placing all ordinals the same, but with a slight underline. In Spanish this is quite common and (almost) expected. In English and other languages it's not a bother. There's another set of superiors ('script') to go with the math set. But that's just one solution among many.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Thanks, Matthew! Since I have the whole 26 glyphs in ordinals, I am aligning them all with the numerators. THANKS!

ChrisL

Don't forget caps: if an ordinal is used in, say, a date that's set in all caps, shouldn't the ordinal be in caps too?

Nick, that's a good question. In all caps situations, roman numerals are generally used which avoids the question, and in dates ordinals aren't used at all.

In older times in such situations, I see it put in all (small raised) caps or with a large tilde with small caps. I think if someone abbreviated María as M.A with a small cap A with tilde (which is hypothetical, I've never seen it that way), they'd be quite confused, ditto for HRMNOS with a (single long) tilde over the small capped (baseline) rmnos.

In modern day applications I generally it's not uncommon to see the lowercase used if another avoidance technique isn't used. If perchance your small cap and numerators have a similar or same height / weight, that might be a good option.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

I never even thought about a caps version, Nick. I can't imagine enough need for it in my kind of work to be worth the effort. It mightwork for a very formal face though.

ChrisL

I think any truly formal situation would avoid any kind of abbreviation. I mean, think about wedding invitations and such

"The Thirteenth of January of Two thousand eight"

I'm actually not doing the superior caps for that, but rather for math equations. I'd see it getting use more in an scholarly document than anything else.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Chris, the Microsoft character standards article also has some info on this.

Well, once I say it's not going to be used too much I'm of course going to find examples.

I found one today at a restaurant, a printed announcement from 1777. It had a few typographic niceties that I'll post later in the general forum, but of interest here, the abbreviations for an all caps line were done also in all caps, raised to match caps-line. They appeared to be either small caps or the next size down caps for the type face. In any case, that probably will work best. Take your small caps and instead of aligning them to the baseline, pop them up to align their caps height with that of your normal caps. Will post the picture when i get it (friend had the higher quality camera so gotta wait for him to e-mail it to me)

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)