Text Figures - History

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 cut a new font for type founder 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.

The use of text figures suffered further setbacks for most of the 20th century, amid attempts to do away with typographic case altogether, and they became rarer still with the advent of phototypesetting. Fine book faces for mechanical typesetting still used text numerals well into the 20th century, and they began to make a strong comeback.

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. However, some fonts offer both text and lining figures, either using OpenType features to select between them or using Unicode's Private Use Area for one or the other set; for instance, Adobe's "Pro" fonts use codepoints U+F643 to U+F64C to encode text figures.

Computer Modern supports text figures but is not the default.