Design

tabular old style is the best numeral style, fight me

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wdym 🤔 like the reason for my preference? Or why they evolved like that?

So there are two things at play there:

1 tabular vs proportional
2 old style vs linear

Tabular basically means monospaced which is very much used today for OCD and coding fonts etc (tldr all widths are the same so you can line em up vertically otherwise 1s are narrower than 9s)

But the 2nd thing is just aesthetic, I guess it's the same reason sans is now more common than serif

But to me old style is so beautiful that when I see lining figures they just feel like sentences written all-caps

It's also how they're meant to be displayed? If you look at the old style 5 for example, that's basically a descender (like the loop on a g)