It’s very common in books, especially histories, it seems, for the number one (1) to be displayed as a capital I in a small font. I’ve tried to research why that is with no luck, and whether there are any fonts in MS Word that display that automatically rather than using some sort of autocorrect to convert a 1 into a small I.

Anyone know why that convention is so commonly used in books?

Do you mean like it converts it to Roman Number "I" ??

Back in the 80's I had a typewriter with no "1" key. No joke, it started with 2. We were taught to use the lower case "l" (Lower L) key.

I suppose is might be the Roman I for 1, but none of the other digits are converted that way.

For example in a book I am reading now, the year 1941 is rendered as I94I, except that the two I letters are in a smaller font than they are in the designation for the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in the same book. In that or in other usages where it’s supposed to be I rather than 1, the I is full sized.

And yes, I’m familiar with the old typewriters that had no number 1 key; we always used a lower case l for it. I think I even remember the first typewriter with a dedicated number key; it might have been an IBM Selectric.

Economy. Then tradition takes over.

quote:

Originally posted by Woodman:
Economy.

So it’s cheaper and/or easier to print a small I rather than a numeral 1?
Did not know that.

There is a book called the Chicago Manual of style. it up to at least the 17th edition.

Came out around 1900 for the first time.

It's like the bible of book design or was.

I would guess the design came from there.

Why? you would have to ask the authors.

The originator of the idea is probably long dead, but others may know how that evolved.

Maybe if it's been scanned in and OCR-ed, the text might have been created by character recognition of of old-typed manuscripts where the authors' typewriters used the letter I instead of the 1?

I can imagine some editors' spell-checkers being taught to let that pass, if they do a lot of work with image-recognized scans from that era and don't want to highlight them as errors.

Best I got, for a hypothesis.

If you want to see if that is built into an actual font design, you can scan in a bit of text, and upload the sample image file to 'WhatTheFont ' and it will give you their best guess as to the name of the typeface style. You never know, some clever font designer may have done this on purpose.

quote:

Originally posted by sig2392:
There is a book called the Chicago Manual of style. it up to at least the 17th edition.

Ah, good idea.
I just checked the 17th Edition and could find no discussion of the I versus 1 convention. The book itself uses ordinary numerals (e.g., 1941), not the small I.

quote:

Originally posted by joel9507:
You never know, some clever font designer may have done this on purpose.

Thanks for the link. I cannot imagine that it isn’t deliberate. It appears in too many books, including the most recent by different publishers, for it to be some sort of artifact, I believe.

The old manual typewriters didn't have a number 1. You'd have to type a capital I lowercase l. Are these books older?

I don't think I've ever seen an "I" or "i" used instead of the numeral "1", but many cases of using the lower case "l" for it.

flashguy

No, but it was cheaper to make one less piece of typeface.

Back when it was stone tablets and cave paintings I was a graphic artist and typographer and I've never heard of such a convention.

Who was the publisher and does the page with the copyright and other publication data list the font used?

quote:

Originally posted by flashguy:
I don't think I've ever seen an "I" or "i" used instead of the numeral "1", but many cases of using the lower case "l" for it.

flashguy

You're correct. It was the lowercase l used for number one on old typewriters. I edited my post.

You may be thinking of "oldstyle" numerals, which are designed to be the height of lowercase letters, with bits that stick above and below, rather than modern numerals which are all capital letter height.

Many fonts with oldstyle numerals use what looks like a small capital "I" (symmetrical serifs top and bottom) for the "1" numeral.

https://www.fonts.com/content/...ers/oldstyle-figures

Most fonts use modern numerals, some use oldstyle, and some let you select between both.

quote:

Originally posted by maladat:
You may be thinking of "oldstyle" numerals ....

That’s exactly it, maladat. Thanks for that informative link.

Just for information, I quickly found three of my books that use an “old style” font with the small I rather than 1.

Keith Jeffrey, The Secret History of MI6, Penguin Books, 2010.
Elizabeth R. Varon, Armies of Deliverance, Oxford University Press, 2019.
Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, Random House, 2019.

And thanks to everyone else who responded. Once again SIGforum comes through.

Added: Just checking the fonts available in my version of Word, there is one, Bookman Old Style, that includes old style in its name, but it still uses the normal 1 numeral.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:

quote:

Originally posted by maladat:
You may be thinking of "oldstyle" numerals ....

That’s exactly it, maladat. Thanks for that informative link.

Wow. I had noticed that before, but never really put much thought into it. Very informative, maladat. Thank you.

Come to think of it, quite a few history books I've read use oldstyle numerals.

IIRC, more British-published books had that numeral font style.

In really formal typesetting, oldstyle numerals are preferred for numbers that appear in bodies of text while modern numerals are used where numbers appear alone or in titles or things like that.

Often fonts in the OpenType font format (OTF) will have both oldstyle and modern numerals, but if you just type in numbers, you get modern numerals. The oldstyle numerals are different characters in the font and you either need to enter the different characters or use them in a program that can convert them for you.

As an example, here is a free OTF font I found after a brief Google that has both numeral styles. If you go down to "view all" and look through the character set, you will see the modern numerals first and then a ways further down the oldstyle numerals.

https://www.fontspace.com/gluk/foglihten

For typography nerds and/or professional typesetters and graphic designers, OTF fonts are great because they allow huge character sets, so they can support stuff like lots of alternate character forms and ligatures. A ligature is where specific letter combinations are combined into a connected symbol - one of the more common ones is when you have "fi" and the dot on the "i" merges with the tip of the "f". Often the crossbar on the "f" extends to the top of the main stroke of the "i" as well.

The font I linked above also has ligature characters if you scroll further down the character list. In a font sense, they are separate characters, but editing software will usually insert at least some of them automatically, or have a setting that will cause it to do so if it doesn't by default.

 
Here's a bit of trivia for you. Upper case and lower case letters derive their name from the fact that in the typesetter's rack, the upper case letters were in the top rack, or case.

Knowing the matter has been resolved, I'll still post late-arriving thoughts related to the economy of early typesetters, who made their letters by hand in wood and then metal.

I've just asked a high school buddy, currently in his second well-established book store. He supposes it to be because the Roman numeral "I" looks the same as a capital "I". So they'd use the same character. Aye?