Text figures (also known as non-lining, lowercase, old style, ranging, hanging, medieval, billing, or antique figures or numerals) are numerals designed with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the name. They are contrasted with lining figures (also called titling or modern figures), which are the same height as upper-case letters. Georgia is an example of a popular typeface that employs text figures by default. Design In text figures, the shape and positioning of the numerals vary as those of lowercase letters do. In the most common scheme, 0, 1, and 2 are of x-height, having neither ascenders nor descenders; 6 and 8 have ascenders; and 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9 have descenders. Other schemes exist; for example, the types cut by the Didot family of punchcutters and typographers in France between the late 18th and early 19th centuries typically had an ascending 3 and 5, a form preserved in some later French typefaces. A few other typefaces used different arrangements. Sometimes the stress of the 0 is made different from a letter o in some way, although many fonts do not do this. High-quality typesetting generally prefers text figures in body text: they integrate better with lowercase letters and small capitals, unlike runs of lining figures. Lining figures are called for in all-capitals settings (hence the alternative name titling figures), and may work better in tables and spreadsheets. Although many traditional fonts included a complete set of each kind of numbers, early digital fonts (except those used by professional printers) included only one or the other. Modern OpenType fonts generally include both, and being able to switch via lnum and onum feature tags. The few common digital fonts that default to using text figures include Candara, Constantia, Corbel, Hoefler Text, Georgia, Junicode, some variations of Garamond (such as the open-source EB Garamond), and FF Scala. Palatino and its clone FPL Neu support both text and lining figures. History As the name medieval numerals implies, text figures have been in use since the Middle Ages, when Arabic numerals reached 12th century Europe, where they eventually supplanted Roman numerals. Lining figures came out of the new middle-class phenomenon of shopkeepers’ hand-lettered signage. They were introduced to European typography in 1788, when Richard Austin cut a new font for typefounder and publisher John Bell, which included three-quarter height lining figures. They were further developed