This article or section should be merged with Regional handwriting variation

In Europe, there are many numerical symbols which are not understood by many, if not all North Americans. First in the list is the "Crossed Seven", habitual in Germany and France, but sporadically used in America (and not permitted to be written on some inventory tags read by computer). This modification is caused by the "Numeral One with a long initial stroke and no underserif." Also, there are two more forms of this numeral used in France (seen on Citroën cowls) : "Numeral One with a long initial stroke and an underserif," and "Numeral One with so long an initial stroke that starts below the underserif and is concave upward." The Germans have used a "Numeral One that has two half-serifs so it looks like a 'Z' somewhat." The Germans also have a "Numeral Four that 'looks like a lightningbolt,'" and in Eastern Europe (seen on a Romanian tank) there is a "Numeral Four that does not have a closed loop, but has a Greek cross form of strokes."

The numerals used by Western countries have two forms: "in-line," or "full-height," both as seen on a typewriter and taught in North America, and "old-style," in which numerals 0, 1, and 2 are x-height; numerals 6 and 8 have bowls within x-height, and ascenders; numerals 3, 5, 7, and 9 have descenders from x-height; and the numeral 4 extends a bit both up and down from x-height. There are other terms for both such sets of numerals.

British presses love "old-style" numerals, even though typewriters cannot print them and they do not exist as distinct symbols in Unicode. This has led to confusion, for the Numeral One in old-style looks like a capital "I," but reduced to x-height, not full height. In the U.S.A., the typewritten "I" means a Roman numeral, and in the typewriter age, the minuscule "l" was first used for it, before the separate character "1" was put on the keyboard. The primary example of this confusion is that a British typist would send a letter to an editor (seen in the periodical Spaceflight) about the space flight "Apollo II," for which the reading "Apollo Eleven" would be intended, whereas this would be read by Americans as being Roman numerals, as a non-existent "Apollo the Second." The British, it seems, gave up on Roman numerals, which had been used for aircraft (e.g., Fokker D.VII, Ki-84-III, and Spitfire IX) nearly to the end of the Second World War. Was it a policy of the Labour Government of 1945 that they were struck, although they have since been used in the U.S.A. and Germany (e.g., Douglas D-558-II, Saturn V). They are still used in complex outlines, in which the structure of relations is necessary to be memorized, rather than simple mods of a computer program, which aren't going to be intercorrelated.

Last is the distinction between the Danish letter "Ø," the Latin letter "O," and the numeral "0." Handwritten data to be typed into a computer necessitates having a distinction between the oh and the zero. In English-speaking countries, often the zero was slashed in technical writing, and so was used in many computer keyboards, screens, and printing methods. But some early computerized systems for managers assumed that the numeral would be entered more often than the letter, so they slashed the oh instead. In time, this became a minority practice. Danes hate both ways! There are three ways of ticking the numeral zero to make it distinct from the letters oh and ø. A tick in the upper right corner derives from the earlier practice, a tick in the upper left corner is used to prevent confusion with all earlier practice, and the very-low-resolution typeface "Fixedsys" has an internal tick, that does not extend beyond the bowl, in both the upper right and lower left. This is the most elegant, but it would take quite a flourish to write it on hundreds of inventory tags. Scandinavian countries prefer a Numeral Zero with a dot in the middle, although low-resolution displays can confuse this with a Numeral Eight, and it takes longer to assuredly make a dot with a ballpoint pen than making a tick.

A note about slashing numerals is that the Numeral Two is not slashed, whereas the Letter Z is, for handwritten form could be confused with the Numeral Two.

Different terms really ought to have been come up with for these three forms of numerals: those used in Arabia today, those exclusive to Europe, and those used throughout the world (0123456789), for it is bad form - scientists never do it - to re-use a term that has already been established for something different.