Don’t you just hate it when you see a report containing a list of fractional numbers and see the decimal point not quite aligned?  Not a significant amount but enough to look a bit unprofessional.  Worse still, if you put a summary line in there using a bold variant of the font.  Now things really go bad and the decimal point disappears off to the West of where it should be.

This is because the nice fonts above are proportional fonts - the space taken up by each character is proportional to the width of the character.  So an ‘1′ takes up less space than an ‘8′.  Of course if you bold these characters then they take up a bit more space too.

Until now, I thought the only way was to use some horrible font like Courier New to ensure things lined up - and as an added bonus, things look like you created them using a 1980’s typewriter.

Well it has come to my attention that there is a way round this.  What you need to do is use a tabular font where every digit takes up exactly the same amount of horizontal space.  Furthermore, the bold variant of each digit also takes up exactly the same amount of space as the plain one due to a thing called weight duplexing.  Clever stuff indeed.

There is a special Fonts for Financials page where you can read more about this technique, view the above wonderful Chronicle Text font and see many, many other beautiful things at typography.com

Does anyone worry about these sort of things for their standard BI reporting?  I think we should.  Install any of these as a default font in your BI environment and for under USD$200 you bought a permanent solution to number creep.  That sounds like a bargain to me.

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