Editing Text figures (section)

== History ==
As the name ''medieval numerals'' implies, text figures have been in use since the [[Middle Ages]], when [[Arabic numerals]] reached 12th century Europe, where they eventually supplanted [[Roman numerals]].

Lining figures came out of the new middle-class phenomenon of shopkeepers’ hand-lettered signage. They were introduced to European typography in 1788, when [[Richard_Austin_(punchcutter)|Richard Austin]] cut a [[Bell MT|new font]] for typefounder and publisher [[John Bell (publisher)|John Bell]], which included three-quarter height lining figures. They were further developed by 19th-century type designers, and largely displaced text figures in some contexts, such as [[newspaper]] and [[advertising]] typography.<ref name="figures Typographia, an Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Printing" /> During the period of transition from text figures to lining, a justification for the old system was that the height differences helped distinguish similar numbers, while a justification for lining figures was that they were clearer (being larger) and that they looked better by giving all page numbers the same height.<ref name="Letters of Credit" /><ref name="figures Typographia, an Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Printing">{{cite book|last1=Hansard|first1=Thomas Curson|title=Typographia, an Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Printing|date=1825|pages=[https://archive.org/details/typographiaanhi01hansgoog/page/n494 430]–1|url=https://archive.org/details/typographiaanhi01hansgoog|access-date=12 August 2015}}</ref> Amusingly, as several later writers have noted, the printer [[Thomas Curson Hansard]] in his landmark textbook on printing ''Typographia'' describes the new fashion as 'preposterous', but the book was printed using lining figures and the [[Didone (typography)|modern typefaces]] he also criticised throughout.<ref name="Letters of Credit">{{cite book|last1=Tracy|first1=Walter|author-link=Walter Tracy|title=Letters of Credit|pages=67–70}}</ref><ref name="The Evolution of the Modern-Face Roman">{{cite journal|last1=Johnson|first1=Alfred F.|author-link1=Alfred F. Johnson|title=The Evolution of the Modern-Face Roman|journal=The Library|date=1930|volume=s4-XI|issue=3|pages=353–377|doi=10.1093/library/s4-XI.3.353}}</ref>

While always popular with [[Fine press|fine printers]], text figures became rarer still with the advent of [[phototypesetting]] and early digital technologies with limited character sets and no support for alternate characters.<ref>{{harvnb|Bringhurst|1992|p= 47}}</ref> Walter Tracy noted that they were avoided by phototypesetting manufacturers since (not being of even height) they could not be miniaturised to form fraction numerals, requiring an additional set of fraction characters.<ref name="Letters of Credit" /> They made a comeback with more advanced digital typesetting systems.<ref name="Hoefler Text design notes">{{cite web |last1=Hoefler |first1=Jonathan |author-link1=Jonathan Hoefler |title=Hoefler Text: design notes |url=https://www.typography.com/fonts/hoefler-text/design-notes |publisher=Hoefler & Co. |access-date=24 May 2019}}</ref>

Modern professional digital fonts are almost universally in one or another variant of the [[OpenType]] format and encode both text and lining figures as OpenType alternate characters. Text figures are not encoded separately in [[Unicode]], because they are not considered separate characters from lining figures, only a different way of writing the same characters.<ref name="Unicode Standard Chapter 22">{{cite book |title=The Unicode® Standard: Version 12.0 – Core Specification |date=2019 |publisher=[[The Unicode Consortium]] |location=Mountain View, CA |isbn=978-1-936213-22-1 |page=820 |access-date=24 May 2019|url=http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode12.1.0/ch22.pdf |chapter=22 |quote=Some variations of decimal digits are considered glyph variants and are not separately encoded. These include the old style variants of digits, as shown in Figure 22-7.}}</ref> [[Adobe Systems|Adobe]]'s early OpenType fonts used [[Private Use Area]] for non-default sets of numerals, but the most recent ones only use OpenType features.<ref>Personal communication from Thomas Phinney, formerly of Adobe Type</ref>