Typography is an ancient and fascinating subject, with many facets: artistic, historic, and technological. At the intersection of these is how technology has shaped the art over time. The design of typefaces has always been shaped both by what the technology was capable of, and what the technology required.

As new typographic technology is introduced, there’s a general trend:

• imitate the old technology,
• discover the possibilities of the new technology,
• develop a new set of norms,
• restore some parts of the old technology in the new.

When Gutenberg first carved type into steel punches to make movable type, he made a number of different versions of each letter to reproduce the variation found in manuscripts. Eventually uniformity became the norm, with sophisticated variant forms later re-introduced as an advanced option.

The web is no different: type on the web is limited by HTML, by ASCII, and by browser support. For example, straight apostrophes and quotes are a compromise required by the limitations of typewriter and computer keyboards. Curly quotes are the return of previous quality, but require a little more work.

Sometimes, though, the old high-quality touches are still inappropriate. I realized one of these in the comments to yesterday’s post about patch. Simon Brunning helpfully provided this snippet:

patch -p0 -i my.patch      # ABC0123456789XYZ

except that instead of the monospace code font I just used, it was in Georgia:

patch -p0 -i my.patch # abc0123456789xyz

See the problem? Georgia’s numerals (or figures) are one of those advanced touches, known as old-style or lowercase figures. In the full range of type possibilities, there are a number of ways of designing figures. Old-style are like lowercase letters: they have a variety of heights, some with ascenders and some with descenders, as the Georgia sample shows. The alternative is called lining, or uppercase figures, which all extend from the baseline to the cap-height, just as uppercase letters do. The monospace font has these, as do most typefaces.

BTW: There’s another way figures can vary: tabular or proportional, which doesn’t affect this discussion, but for the full details, have a look at the FontFeed’s OSF, LF, and TF Explained.

The problem here is that Georgia’s old-style figures make it impossible to distinguish a zero and a lowercase o. Of course, with lining figures, it would be difficult to distinguish a zero and an uppercase O, and don’t get me started on the whole l/1/I (ell/one/Eye) thing. Maybe the problem here is setting code samples in a proportional face in the first place.

Typographers would tell you that typefaces have to be chosen carefully for their intended use. The FontFeed article above makes clear that the choice of old-style or lining figures depends on what numbers you are setting: in running text, best to use old-style, in tables use lining. No mention of Unix commands!

So what’s a web designer to do? In this case, it is especially complicated, because comments can contain any kind of content at all, with minimal markup limited by the tools, and provided by the commenter. Even if my comment form provided a <code> tag, readers would have to know to use it, and remember to use it each time they provided a code sample.

No typeface is going to be right for all uses, and the choices are limited by having to consider cross-platform browser issues. Georgia is at least one of the web-safe fonts, so I can be reasonably certain I know what my readers are seeing.

Georgia’s old-style figures are a nice touch, a whiff of the high-craft past in our sterile modern times. The title of this post is a bit harsh: they aren’t bad. But using them indiscriminately in web content isn’t always a good thing. The best answer may be yet more technology, finding ways to guide the use of the old tools appropriately for new contexts.