Pica Numbers

Summary

Pica Numbers 2025-08-19 by David Jones There’s a fun fact about typewriter fonts that i mentioned in passing in my earlier pica article, that i’ll expand on here: On typewriters it is common to have a font where the numbers are bigger than the capitals. (and by bigger i mean taller; all the glyphs are the same width, because this is a typewriter) I’ve not seen other sources point this out directly, so it may even be my discovery—in the sense of me being the first one to write it down. Here, the Selectric sample that i used in the earlier pica article. Pica is the basic font that a lot of typewriters are fitted with, and here i’ll document a few Picas that have “numbers bigger than capitals”, then for contrast some that don’t. The fact that the numbers are bigger than the capitals isn’t super clear on the Selectric sample above. I’ve seen Nina Kalinina’s wonderful typewriter thread, so i knew she had an Olympus SM4—a classic described by some as the “Mercedes–Benz” of typewriters—and i knew the SM4 had similar numbers; i asked for a sample specifically to illustrate the number heights. The 4, 6, 8 clearly ascend above the Cap-height (here represented by the H). Just like the Selectric. The numbers are different heights. That itself is not so unusual, it’s called old-style or lowercase numbers in regular fonts. Here’s the font that Tufte uses in his books: Sample of ETBembo, showing the ascending and descending numbers typical of old-style. The unusual thing in typewriters is that the numbers are bigger than the capitals. The SM4 and Selectric follow a very similar ascending/descending pattern in their numbers, which is pretty typical: 3, 5, 7, 9 descend; 4, 6, 8 ascend. Which follows the usual style of lowercase numbers, which is perhaps why the typewriter numbers don’t seem that out of place, even though they are taller. (aside: as you can see in the ETBembo sample, the 4 descends—the 4 is a cheeky little number that doesn’t always follow any particular rules) The P...