hmm, on Thu, May 18, 2006 at 08:48:23AM +0200, Taco Hoekwater said that
The mathematical center of the line is not necesarily the optical center, so a somewhat more correct approach would put all the stuff in an \hbox and then compute manually how far it has to drop down.
i haven't used latex for quite some time now, so i can't recall how problematic it was to accomplish something like this, but i find it interesting that there is no easy approach to this.
For a more pleasing look, it would perhaps be even better to line up a normal '7' as if it was an oldstyle numeral, and then enlarging it while keeping the same vertical alignment ratio.
i've tried the old style numeral but i didn't like it. by "keeping the same vertical alignment ratio" do you mean something like \raise? -f -- i thank my lucky stars i'm not superstitious.