It’s fun when fonts introduce alternative characters and you get to choose which one to pick. It was the most fun for the Kievit Slab Italic we chose for our pull quotes. That flamboyant ampersand! The four-storey g!

Charter, the new hard-working body font, was not as extravagant, but provided an alternative for the dollar sign. That’s how we ended up with a single stroke $ for regular text, but… more formal two-stroke $ for italics.

In Kievit Bold, it was fun to (re)discover some of the many fascinating international characters, including two I learned rather intimately: the (disappearing) Polish S and the Turkish dotless I.

And then… this. How often do you see a completely new letter? Say hello to ẞ, uppercase sharp s (also known as eszett), which became official in Germany only in 2010 — previously, lowercase ß simply turned into SS when capitalized.

Wikipedia hints that “as of April 2008, typographers have yet to agree on a standard form for the letter capital ẞ,” although the designers of Kievit took their chances. The end result is shown above alongside similar-looking, but completely disparate glyphs eszett should not be confused with.

(Fun fact: a few years ago another type designer vandalized his own font out of dislike for the proposed shape of ẞ.)

A richer-than-usual set of ligatures in Kievit Slab Italic. The common ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl (ah, the f, always causing trouble) are joined by a few more pairings — including one with the alternate k mentioned above.

Now, finally, I can reaffirm my affections to Kafka and write a baffling, offbeat story while halfheartedly overlooking a fjord. And I mean, fluoroscopically.

If the above-mentioned international glyphs were not enough, we can also see a set of accents meant to combine with other characters to create diacritics. Those include dialytika tonos, itself a combination of dialytika and tonos, indicating that a (Greek) vowel should both pronounced separately (dialytika) and stressed (tonos).

Most of the accents beautiful names — circumflex, diaeresis, macron, breve — but my favourite one is ogonek, literally Polish for little tail, used in this language’s ą and ę.

But then there’s also the aisle of ugly characters with hilarious names, including the odd pilcrow. The above batch comes from Charter.

(Actually, that dagger is quite handsome!)

And then, not one, but three sets of digits in Kievit. The first row, old-style digits, are meant to blend with text, pretending they’re lowercase letters. 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9 dip below (like j or y would), 6 and 8 stick out above, and 0, 1 and 2 are happy in their own little space — not unlike x or e.

But that doesn’t work in all the situations. Enter lining digits. Those are the most commonly used ones. All with consistent height, they belong to headlines.

And there are tabular digits, all sharing the same height, but also width. They are meant to be used — yes, the name gives it away — in tables and spreadsheets, where it’s important for numbers to align perfectly.

Like with all of typography, everything has fifteen different names:

• old-style digits are also known as medieval or antique,
• lining digits are also called titling, since they belong to titles,
• tabular digits are monospaced (and non-tabular proportional).

And digits themselves are also called figures and numerals, all of which makes for exhausting Google search sessions.

And you might have wondered… are there also old-style tabular digits? The answer is an emphatic hells yeah:

We don’t use this last type on Medium, but we do use all the other ones. We’ll let you “figure” out where.

Exploring Charter, we encounter a curious double exclamation mark, right next to a regular exclamation mark. Why a separate glyph rather than just adjusting kerning? I don’t know… but then again, we’ve used the same thing for ellipsis ever since we launched Medium.

Oh, yes! Since you were dying to know: kerning is also called mortising, and is not to be confused with letter spacing, also known as tracking. (No kidding: part of embracing typography is getting a good glossary.)

To wrap up our list of oddities and our tour in general, here’s a few of Kievit Bold’s many vulgar fractions… the rather uncommon zero thirds is here, but for some reason not three thirds. Anyone have an idea why?