Does anybody know about how old style figures are used in technical areas that use a lot of symbolic notation like math, most sciences, linguistics, logic, chess books, etc., if at all? I've never seen them in a work of any such discipline, though that's not saying much. I don't seem to recall them in any of the textbooks I used for these subjects, but perhaps I wasn't typographically "aware" at the time.

Thanks in advance.

Hello everybody,

I'm a first year graphic design student, so I'm just starting out. Since I'm doing graphic design now, everybody suddenly wants my advice for their birthday invitations etc. Most of the time I'm able to help them, but now I've got a question I don't have an answer to.

My dad needs a font for text that contains a lot of numbers. I've spoken to him about it and showed him some fonts that are already on his computer, like Georgia which has text figures (old style/hanging numbers). He didn't like the that there's only a bold, a regular and an italic, as he needs a semi-bold as well... I am willing to pay for a good typeface with old style numbers, as I think I'll be able to use it in coming years anyway, but it shouldn't be too exclusive/expensive as I am a student.

So everyone I look, it seems that if you're going to use old style figures at all in a work, then anywhere titling figures appear, it'd better be in an all caps environment. But if we're to really stick with the

old style figures : titling figures :: lowercase : upper case

analogy, wouldn't that mean the '7' in

Chapter 7

ought not to have that descender? After all, in words, it would be "Chapter Seven." (It actually makes me pause when I see "September 23, 2010" and all the numbers are text figures. That can't be good, right?) But then, following the rule strictly,

Chapter 11

ought to have two different styles for the two different '1's. !!! =(