You could set your font preferences to those fonts that provide equal-width numerals. Probably a lot faster and more robust than (waiting for) DT to use a different font for numeric columns – how would it even know that in all cases? See the screenshot below
Sean, I hear you - but these days are over… now we have not only proportional numerals (unless we use a monospaced font just by itself), but also the horrendous spacing for “1”.
From a usability point of view, lining numerals vertically is much better for visual scanning and detecting patterns. Alas, maybe it’s all pointing in the direction of AI doing it for us (half-joking).
Perhaps it is possible to find a variable font with a font-variant-numeric: monospaced on fonts.google? But I have no idea if macOS works with this kind of thing.
(Scroll down to find recent, more relevant posts).
Ok, the point is, proportional numerals are a ligature/attribute of font files which can be specified programmatically at the time of use
So it’s not about changing fonts for text vs numerals, its specifying a font attribute (not unlike bold, or italic) on a font when it’s used in a table.
So I’m certainly not asking DT to do anything except, when specifying font attributes like font and size, to specify tabular numerals (which I believe if aren’t available won’t be shown).
As @uimike says, it’s a usability benefit when listing tabular data.
Easy to do with Excel, which by definition has only tabular data. In DT, they’d have to introduce code that checks the context where the strings are displayed. I’m not saying that it is impossible, but that probably requires a lot of code changes. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
What I’m asking, is that for tables, sidebars and inspectors, in those views they specify monospacedDigit(), and if it’s available for the font for those elements, it will show it. If a user chooses a font for which it’s not available, it won’t show it.
I’m not asking it for dialog boxes, previews, editing windows, etc.
There are apparently equivalents for SwiftUI, UIKit and AppKit – Monospace Digits
UPDATE: UIKit example there is only for system fonts. I know this has been available before as standard in fonts available in the OS, but I can’t say when it changed. I’m continuing to research.
I’d rather we wait to hear from the developers if that method is available in whatever framework they do use, rather than having users conjecture on whether it is possible or not, or proclaiming how they’d “have” to do it.
We’ve definitely seen the request now and it’s noted but there are no plans anytime soon to change this as we don’t revise our internal roadmap every day.
It’s just a request based on what appears to be an available attribute which could be set for text views, but I totally get you have a roadmap, and that you don’t down tools on that for every requested feature and that you have other products you’re working on, too! I’m looking forward to DTTG4 before I’d expect work to be done on this.
I honestly love your work (and that of the rest of the developers!), which I think should be clear from my other posts as well as this explicit statement here.
