From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

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23 Use proportional old-style figures in body text

23 Use proportional old-style figures in body text

From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

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23 Use proportional old-style figures in body text

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- Law 23: Use proportional oldstyle figures in body text. You may not be aware of this, but some typefaces contain different types of figures that have been designed for different uses. Figures is just another word for numbers. Proportional figures have been designed to consume different amounts of space based on the shape of each number. In proportional figures, the number one takes up less space than the number eight. Proportional figures work well within lines of mixed-case text, like body text. Another type of figures are tabular figures. Tabular figures are numbers that have been created to take up the same amount of horizontal and vertical space. A number one takes up exactly the same amount of space as a number eight, and every other number. Because of this, tabular figures are great for creating tables of text because they stay aligned with each other. Tabular figures are the numbers that you get automatically when you start typing numbers in a document. Within each of these…

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