Comment by retrac
1 day ago
Both Latin and Chinese have been modified by the technology used to write them.
When carved in stone the lines are much straighter. When written with brush or pen they became semi-cursive. When printing was introduced, they became grid-like and regular.
What westerners who are passingly familiar would think of as the standard Chinese typeface - the strict square grid with straight-line characters - arises in part from printing technology. Easy to carve that into wood blocks, and easy to line up the slots into a grid.
Latin was similarly morphed to fit into the realities of printing in the 1500s. And is still being morphed. Notice how numbers 123... are in-line and at the same height as the letters. That's a very modern convention, typewriter and computer influence on our orthography. Traditionally digits were more likely to appear as subscript, off-centre.
what selective pressures against oldstyle numerals with ascenders/descenders existed that wouldn't have equally applied to letterforms with those same features?
(aha i have found the answer to my own question: miniaturization for fractions in phototypesetting)
the other part is that numbers and symbols were very much not the priority. The printing press was for books, magazines etc. math remained hand written until the computer
Nope, not at all. Monotype had a special system for doing math in hot metal typesetting. With handset type it was possible, but very time-consuming. You can find typeset mathematics going back centuries before the computer. There were also (somewhat impractical) systems for setting music with metal type although engraving was more common because of the interactions of lines and symbols.
Not really. The selective pressure really comes well before that: Tabular presentation of numbers, whether that was log/trig tables or railroad time tables, there was a preference for uniform-width and regular height characters for those contexts (this is also why there is a number-width parameter in TT typography to enable a designer to let digits be variable-width in text but still allow tabular setting if desired).