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There are various stylistic and typographic variations to the Arabic numeral system.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(August 2008) |
There are various stylistic and typographic variations to the Arabic 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 in North America, and old-style figures, in which numerals 0, 1 and 2 are at x-height; numerals 6 and 8 have bowls within x-height, and ascenders; numerals 3, 5, 7 and 9 have descenders 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 though typewriters cannot print them and they are not assigned separate Unicode values. The old-style numeral one 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 the Roman 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 the Danish/Norwegian letter "Ø," the Latin 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 many computer 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.
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-resolution typeface "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.
The "Crossed Seven" is commonly used throughout Europe, but, outside of mathematics, is sporadically used in the United 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.
0 (zero) is a number representing an empty quantity. Adding 0 to any number leaves that number unchanged. In mathematical terminology, 0 is the additive identity of the integers, rational numbers, real numbers, and complex numbers, as well as other algebraic structures. Multiplying any number by 0 has the result 0, and consequently, division by zero has no meaning in arithmetic.
A typeface is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size, weight, slope, width, and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
Although people in many parts of the world share common alphabets and numeral systems, styles of handwritten letterforms vary between individuals, and sometimes also vary systematically between regions.
Omicron is the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. This letter is derived from the Phoenician letter ayin: . In classical Greek, omicron represented the close-mid back rounded vowel IPA:[o] in contrast to omega which represented the open-mid back rounded vowel IPA:[ɔː] and the digraph ου which represented the long close-mid back rounded vowel IPA:[oː]. In modern Greek, both omicron and omega represent the mid back rounded vowel IPA:[o̞] or IPA:[ɔ̝]. Letters that arose from omicron include Roman O and Cyrillic O|Ю (Cyrillic)|Ю. The word literally means "little O" as opposed to "great O". In the system of Greek numerals, omicron has a value of 70.
Ø is a letter used in the Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Southern Sámi languages. It is mostly used as to represent the mid front rounded vowels, such as and, except for Southern Sámi where it is used as an diphthong.
In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Along with blackletter and roman type, it served as one of the major typefaces in the history of Western typography.
Courier is a monospaced slab serif typeface commissioned by IBM and designed by Howard "Bud" Kettler (1919–1999) in the mid-1950s. The Courier name and typeface concept are in the public domain. Courier has been adapted for use as a computer font, and versions of it are installed on most desktop computers.
Computer Modern is the original family of typefaces used by the typesetting program TeX. It was created by Donald Knuth with his Metafont program, and was most recently updated in 1992. Computer Modern, or variants of it, remains very widely used in scientific publishing, especially in disciplines that make frequent use of mathematical notation.
Lucida is an extended family of related typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes and released from 1984 onwards. The family is intended to be extremely legible when printed at small size or displayed on a low-resolution display – hence the name, from 'lucid'.
Text figures 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, which are the same height as upper-case letters. Georgia is an example of a popular typeface that employs text figures by default.
The dotted or slashed zero 0̷ is a representation of the Arabic digit "0" (zero) with a slash or a dot through it. This variant zero glyph is often used to distinguish the digit "zero" ("0") from the Latin script letter "O" anywhere that the distinction needs emphasis, particularly in encoding systems, scientific and engineering applications, computer programming, and telecommunications. It thus helps to differentiate characters that would otherwise be homoglyphs. It was commonly used during the punch card era, when programs were typically written out by hand, to avoid ambiguity when the character was later typed on a card punch.
In orthography and typography, a homoglyph is one of two or more graphemes, characters, or glyphs with shapes that appear identical or very similar but may have differing meaning. The designation is also applied to sequences of characters sharing these properties.
In metal typesetting, a font or fount is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface, defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design. For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni includes fonts "Roman", "bold" and "italic"; each of these exists in a variety of sizes.
L, or l, is the twelfth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is el, plural els.
HCESAR is a Portuguese typewriter keyboard layout that takes its name from the first six letters on the first row of alphabetical keys: HCESAR. Created by decree of the Estado Novo regime on July 17, 1937, the layout placed the most frequently used keys in Portuguese in the center of the layout. The keys for vowels are positioned according to an inverted vowel diagram.
Strikethrough, or strikeout, is a typographical presentation of words with a horizontal line through their center, resulting in text like this, sometimes an X or a forward slash is typed over the top instead of using a horizontal line. Strike-through was used in medieval manuscripts. Contrary to censored or sanitized (redacted) texts, the words remain readable.
A numeral is a character that denotes a number. The decimal number digits 0–9 are used widely in various writing systems throughout the world, however the graphemes representing the decimal digits differ widely. Therefore Unicode includes 22 different sets of graphemes for the decimal digits, and also various decimal points, thousands separators, negative signs, etc. Unicode also includes several non-decimal numerals such as Aegean numerals, Roman numerals, counting rod numerals, Mayan numerals, Cuneiform numerals and ancient Greek numerals. There is also a large number of typographical variations of the Western Arabic numerals provided for specialized mathematical use and for compatibility with earlier character sets, such as ² or ②, and composite characters such as ½.
A subscript or superscript is a character that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, while superscripts are above. Subscripts and superscripts are perhaps most often used in formulas, mathematical expressions, and specifications of chemical compounds and isotopes, but have many other uses as well.
The modern numerical digit 0 is usually written as a circle, an ellipse or a rounded square or rectangle.
1 is a number, numeral, and glyph. It is the first and smallest positive integer of the infinite sequence of natural numbers. This fundamental property has led to its unique uses in other fields, ranging from science to sports, where it commonly denotes the first, leading, or top thing in a group. 1 is the unit of counting or measurement, a determiner for singular nouns, and a gender-neutral pronoun. Historically, the representation of 1 evolved from ancient Sumerian and Babylonian symbols to the modern Arabic numeral.