Using Font Shaping To Put Commas in Big Numbers EVERYWHERE!
168My job involves a lot of staring at large numbers, mostly latencies in nanoseconds, and picking out magnitudes like microseconds. I noticed myself constantly counting digits in my text editor, in my terminal, and in Jupyter notebooks in my browser.
I could have made specific solutions for each, but I thought “How could I solve this in the most general way possible?” and an idea came to me: I could make a font that uses fancy font shaping features to insert commas in all numbers, everywhere.
It was a fun idea, so I decided to play with it on my own time. After an evening reading documentation and a Sunday spent tinkering, I had it working! I’ve been using the resulting font at work for a few weeks now and it’s been a really pleasant improvement.
In this post I’ll describe the basics of OpenType shaping, how I used it to make a font that emphasizes digit grouping, and how I extended it with even fancier variations.
PUBLICATION PERMISSIONS:
Original video was published with the Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed). Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EReoVpb9LJo&t=19082s