Post #1084312
2026-04-10 13:12 UTC
I wanted to design a set of European digits for my font Astrolabe (https://aliftype.com/astrolabe/english).
I don’t usually do that, but I thought digits would be easy. I went for slab serif and old-style as it felt like a good fit. I tried to get some “inspirations” but I think I ended up basically copying @tiro_j’s Slabo (and messed it up in the process). I added both proportional and tabular sets. I added also numerators and denominators.
The result looks OK, but I can’t do Latin design even if my life depended on it.
Here are some samples next to Arabic text, and comparison with existing Arabic digits.
Replies (3)
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@khaled@typo.social 2026-04-10 13:14
(I went for slab serif initially because I wanted to re-use the “serifs” of the Arabic glyphs, but it looked awful).
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@iorsh@kishkush.net 2026-04-10 14:33
@khaled I think Astrolabe really calls for digits with serifs, and your decision to use old-style digits looks promising.
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@gharbeia@mastodon.social 2026-04-11 06:03
@khaled I'm curious to know why do you consider this western variation of the numerals Latin.