 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Arabic numeral variations" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(August 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
There are various stylistic and typographic variations to theArabic numeral system.
The numerals used by Western countries have two forms:lining ("in-line" or "full-height") figures as seen on a typewriter and taught inNorth America, andold-style figures, in which numerals 0, 1 and 2 are atx-height; numerals 6 and 8 have bowls within x-height, andascenders; numerals 3, 5, 7 and 9 havedescenders from x-height; and the numeral 4 rests along the baseline. Lining figures are generally designed all the same setting width, as this makes the printing of mathematical and trigonometrical tables simpler to do and clearer to read. Non-lining figures tend to be preferred where numbers occur within sentences, for instance when a date is given in figures in a line of text.
British presses have been partial to "old-style" numerals,[citation needed] even thoughtypewriters cannot print them and they are not assigned separateUnicode values. The old-style numeralone can resemble a capital "I" reduced to x-height, and this can lead to confusion e.g. of the number 11 (when written in old-style digits) with theRoman numeral II (meaning the number two). On the other hand, with some sans serif faces, using lining figures, there can be confusion between the figure 1, lower case l (L) and upper case I (I).
A distinction exists between theDanish/Norwegian letter "Ø," theLatin letter "O," and the numeral "0".[1]Handwritten data to be typed into a computer necessitates having a distinction between the letter "O" and numeral "0". In English-speaking countries,zero was often slashed in technical writing, and was used in manycomputer keyboards, screens and printing methods. Some early computerized systems for managers assumed that the numeral would be entered more often than the letter, so they slashed the letter instead. In time this became a minority practice, and it is very confusing for Danish‑ and Norwegian-speaking people.[citation needed]
There are three ways of ticking the numeral zero to make it distinct from the letters O and Ø. A tick in the upper right corner derives from the earlier practice, a tick in the upper left corner is used to prevent confusion with all earlier practices, and the very-low-resolutiontypeface "Fixedsys" has an internal tick, that does not extend beyond the bowl, in both the upper right and lower left. This is the most elegant, but it would take quite a flourish to write it on hundreds of inventory tags. Scandinavian countries prefer a numeral zero with a dot in the middle, although low-resolution displays can confuse this with a numeral eight, and it takes longer to assuredly make a dot with a ballpoint pen than making a tick.[citation needed]
The "Crossed Seven" is commonly used throughout Continental Europe, but, outside of mathematics, is only sporadically used in theBritish Isles or theUnited States, and it is not permitted to be written on some inventory tags that are optically read by computers.[citation needed]
There are two forms of the numeral one used in France, as seen on Citroën cowls:
Central Europe uses a 'one' that has two half-serifs so it looks somewhat like a 'Z'. The region further uses a numeral four that looks like a lightning bolt, and in some areas of Eastern Europe, as seen on Romanian tanks, there is a numeral four that does not have a closed loop, but has a Greek cross form of strokes. Usually the numeral two is not slashed, whereas the letter Z is, because the handwritten form could be confused with the numeral two.
{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)