Wonderful attention to detail, and beautiful results. But i just can't use a font that has ragged numerals; they seem jarring and counterproductive. Much prefer fonts that have uniformity in the numeral glyphs. Most must disagree with me because oddly sized artistic numerals seems quite common in new fonts.
Actually, the “oddly sized” (“old-style”) numerals are most common in old typefaces, even more than in new ones (or more specifically, new professional typefaces typically include both). The uniform-height numerals are basically the “upper case” variants, which should typically only be used when typesetting numerals in the middle of text in all caps, tables of pure numbers, mathematical formulas, or the like.
When you have a paragraph of regular words, set in lower case, a “capitalized” number is very visually heavy and distracting, unbalancing the flow of the text.
At some point in the relatively recent past uniform-height numbers started to become the norm, I suspect largely because of typewriters and then early computers. (It hasn’t been until relatively recently (e.g. with OpenType) that software could easily set numerals in both the lowercase and uppercase versions. In the 90s, most high-quality commercial typefaces sold separate “pro” fonts which had small caps, old-style numerals, extra ligatures, etc., and the typesetter had to explicitly select the relevant characters and change the font to get those features, instead of just setting a feature flag for a whole text block.)
Is there empirical evidence that "capitalized" numbers are more difficult to read? I'm genuinely interested, but I do feel like a lot of typography is based on aesthetic assessments of individual glyphs, sentences, or blocks of text as opposed to studies of legibility.
"Tinker compared old-style and modern (lining) figures and found a non-significant advantage for old-style figures in terms of reading speed and error rate. (Oddly, modern lining figures were easier to read at a distance – on a billboard, for example. In other tests, capital letters were also found to be more legible than lowercase when set large and at a distance, so these findings do seem to agree."
From: "Taking it in – what makes type easy to read and why" [1] by Kathleen Tinkel, citing "Legibility of Print" by Miles Tinker, Iowa State University Press, 1963.
A lot of fonts these days come with 4 different styles of numerals/figures (http://fontfeed.com/archives/figuring-out-numerals/). Typographically each has its different uses: inline with lowercase letters you usually use proportional oldstlye figures, while tabular ones are reserved for numerical data like dollar amounts and things. If you dislike the default figure style of a typeface you should see if they have different ones available via OpenType features.
