(Ignoring that g for now)
Numbers shouldn’t be randomly dropping down and coming up. It looks ridiculous and makes Antique unusable if your text includes numbers.
8 Likes
I think that’s actually a way that some people would write the numbers. I just google-image searched “Antique font” and found quite a few that set up the numbers in the exact fashion. I’m no historian though.
Still would be easier for development if they were matched up.
Edit: I guess it’s called “oldstyle” (https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-3/numbers/oldstyle-figures)
9 Likes
I am planning on eventually exposing OpenType features as a way of controlling stylistic variations like these text figures (including smallcaps, letter variants, swashes, ligatures, etc.). The limiting factor in doing this right now is that pretty much the only font we have that exposes any features is Source Sans.
The Antique font is kind of especially crappy, and does not expose any features. Text figures are baked in and there is no option to turn them off. It also doesn’t have full Latin script coverage, so languages like Vietnamese look like ransom note text in it. For these reasons, I want to replace it with a new antique-type font in the future, but so far I haven’t found a suitable replacement (finding fonts with good features and script coverage is really hard - something like 95% of all the fonts in existence only cover ASCII instead of full Latin).
12 Likes
And the quality ones that do are not free, but are often quite expensive.