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plain*clothes wrote: > how did you arrive at the conclusion that > the 1 should be flanked by unnecessary white space? as mentioned > earlier, Actually, I was first struck by the misreading of lowercase l and figure 1, bad enough because they are very similar in some fonts, and made much worse when the numeral is set as a proportional character. I first noticed this problem back in the late 80s in galleys of text set on our in-house Compugraphic typesetter. When I asked the tech rep about changing the proportional width of the figure 1 to the fixed figure width, (1) she was surprised that someone would want it that way, and (2) she didn't know how to change the settings! (I gritted my teeth and soldiered on for about a year until our Macs arrived and we switched to DTP.) The value of using a fixed-width numeral 1 is obvious in tabular settings. In text settings, it's of equal value in a series of hanging-indent, numbered lists (which, I suppose, are little more than tabular lists of a specific kind). I believe fixed-width lining figures are proper in text settings. Now, perhaps font designers can put both a proportional 1 and a fixed 1 in the same font, to be used in different situations. I suspect it would be tedious and inefficient to switch between fixed-width 1 and proportional 1 in text, either when the text is keyed in or when it is styled in layout (but probably no more onerous than mixing expert sets or OSF fonts with regular fonts in the same text). ----- Michael Brady http://www.unc.edu/~jbrady/index.html