More lay description for "Use old style figures"?

[Scott Kostyshak]

On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 06:28:56PM +0200, Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote:
> Am Samstag, den 11.07.2020, 22:42 -0400 schrieb Scott Kostyshak:
> > It would be nice to describe the feature in a way that LyX users who
> > don't know anything about "old style figures" can immediately realize
> > that they don't need to check those boxes or search for what they do.
> > The tooltip did not help me. It says "Use old style instead of lining
> > figures".

The argument that the term "is also what LibreOffice, Scribus,
QuarkXPress, InDesign, and Word uses, and it's the term used in the
OpenType specification" is a convincing one to me. I tested LibreOffice
but could not find where in the dialogs it is mentioned. I thought I
would find it in Format > Character, but did not.

> Would this help?
> 
> "Use numerals with ascenders and descenders (Old Style Figures)
> that fit more elegantly in lower-case text rather than numerals with
> constant upper-case height (Lining Figures)"

Not that much. As someone who doesn't know much about fonts, I really
don't know from that description whether I should use the feature or
invest the time to learn more about it. It helps a bit because it has
the word "numerals" so at least I know we're talking about numerals,
rather than "figures" which I associate with graphics.

It would be nice to have a term that users with more knowledge than I of
fonts recognize but that users like me can at least realize they
probably don't have to spend time figuring out what the feature does.
Enrico's suggestion of "Use antique numerals" does that, and so does
"Use medieval-style numerals". Perhaps we can add one of those to the
tooltip? e.g., <<Also known as 'antique numerals', [insert your
technical description]>>.

I guess the reason I was confused is that now in 2.4 we present three
text boxes with "Use old style figures" instead of one since we allow
customization for each font. This is a nice feature but it makes me
think the option must be important since there are three text boxes for
it. But Googling for "old style figures" and figuring out that I don't
need the feature only takes a minute, and the user will probably
remember that the next time; so it is not a big deal. Perhaps in the
future if we add more customization (e.g., more features that can be
customized by font) we can redesign the UI a bit to optimize the dialog
for the average user but at the same time allow for more advanced
customization.  Perhaps a checkbox "customize separately by font"? But I
am biased towards my own usage of LyX. Perhaps there are more users than
I think that use one of the three (scale, options, "use old style
figures") per font.

Thanks to everyone for the replies. I'm fine with leaving it as it is. I
understand now that we should not rename the universally-used term for
the option. I suppose the only thing we could consider is to add
something like "antique numerals" in the tooltip.

Scott
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