Pica Numbers

Pica Numbers

2025-08-19

by David Jones

There’s a fun fact about typewriter fonts that i mentioned in passing in my earlier pica article, that i’ll expand on here:

On typewriters it is common to have a font where the numbers are bigger than the capitals.

(and by bigger i mean taller; all the glyphs are the same width, because this is a typewriter)

I’ve not seen other sources point this out directly, so it may even be my discovery—in the sense of me being the first one to write it down.

Here, the Selectric sample that i used in the earlier pica article.

Pica is the basic font that a lot of typewriters are fitted with, and here i’ll document a few Picas that have “numbers bigger than capitals”, then for contrast some that don’t.

The fact that the numbers are bigger than the capitals isn’t super clear on the Selectric sample above. I’ve seen Nina Kalinina’s wonderful typewriter thread, so i knew she had an Olympus SM4—a classic described by some as the “Mercedes–Benz” of typewriters—and i knew the SM4 had similar numbers; i asked for a sample specifically to illustrate the number heights.

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