I like looking at annual reports as a good source of data visualizations. Much of the typical report is just feel-good decoration, and the graphs usually fall into that category with lots of shine but little content. However, what caught by eye in the Public Citizen 2008 annual report [PDF], was a table of numbers (the graphs aren’t too great either).
See anything odd about the numbers? The columns are not aligned vertically because of different digit widths; in particular, the “1″ digit is very narrow. As a result, the Publications and Subscriptions value seems smaller than the Grants value at first glance, since the latter number is wider.
I thought it was a cardinal rule of font design that all digits were the same width. Unicode even has a “Figure Dash” character, which is a dash with the same width as the digit characters.
I set out to find the font in question. First I sampled what I had on my Mac. I didn’t find the font, but I did find several fonts with digits of unequal width. Most of them were artful fonts like Comic Sans, but Georgia was also in that category.
Next I tried Indentifont, a clever idea for identifying a font by asking a series of questions about the characters, such as what kind of bar the “G” has. It returned a few fonts that matched by answers, but none that looked like the report text. The “1″ and the “t” are particularly distinctive.
Finally I realized that with the PDF available I could just examine the file in a text editor. After searching for the word “Font” a few times, I kept seeing the word “Knockout” nearby. Checking the characters on the foundry site the Knockout font family, shows a perfect match for the font called “No. 32 Junior Cruiserweight”.
So my theory about fonts was wrong, but I still hold that tables of numbers should never contains variable-width digits.