Typophile

Lowercase figures for Frutiger?

Have you ever seen oldstyle figures for Font Family Frutiger LT St?

I mean, figures that have

ascenders : 6, 8
descenders : 3,4,5,7,9
x - height only : 1,2,0

Like ITC Braganza.
http://www.fonts.com/AboutFonts/Articles/fyti/OldstyleFigs.htm

Check out Frutiger Next, which introduced oldstyle figs in the opentype fonts.

I've seen them in specimens, but never in use.
In the documentary on Frutiger Next, Adrian Frutiger does a quick sketch of the oldstyle figures (in which he makes a mistake on "4"), which Akira Kobayashi implements (fixing the mistake).
So I don't think the designer's heart was in it (really, it's a feature made to accommodate Adobe layout apps and the OpenType format), and a bit of a travesty for this modern typeface.

What's the mistake?

I disagree.

Unless you are setting tables or columns of numbers, 'old style' figures look more 'natural' within blocks of text on a page.

But, that's my opinion :)

What's the mistake?

IIRC, one of the characters which normally has a descender was standing on the baseline; the 4, I think.

This site gives the best online showing:

http://www.identifont.com/find?font=frutiger+next&q=Go

Correct though they may be, don't you find the oldstyle figures quaint in proportion and busy in comparison to the sublimely modern reduction of the alphabetic characters?

A version of Frutiger Linotype with oldstyle figures was at one time (and may still be) included with Microsoft Reader, a free, downloadable application for reading eBooks on Windows-based devices.

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 26 Apr 2015. original URL