10th of December, 2025
OpenType feature tips: tabular figures

This is part of a set of posts on OpenType font features. Here's the full list of posts:

• introduction
• tabular figures
• case-sensitive forms
• ordinals
• Gaelic type

Figures (meaning numerals, like 0 through 9) tend to have similar, but not identical widths, and “1” tends to be thinner than the others, but in some situations like tables and timestamps they look a lot better taking up the same width, so you can easily compare numbers (try entering numbers in any spreadsheet app vs any notes or word processor app).

Enter “tabular figures”, codename tnum, which swaps numerals and some related glyphs for fixed-width versions.

Most of these characters just need to have their side-bearings expanded a little so they all fill the same horizontal space. A few benefit from being a little redesigned so they take up more horizontal space, e.g. adding/widening serifs on the numeral “1” or drawing parentheses with a stronger curve.

These are the characters I'd change in tabular figures, if they're included in the font:

• numerals
• hyphens
• maths symbols used in basic arithmetic, e.g. plus, minus, multiply, divide
• numerical separators (period, comma, colon, any non-numeral character commonly used inside a number or numerical string like a timestamp)
• parentheses, brackets, and braces
• currency symbols
• en dash, figure dash, and underscore
• figure space

Tabular figures is a pretty straightforward feature that's often pretty easy to implement—just add space and one or two details. The other features in this set of posts get even more complex!