A coding font with ligatures would be sweet. It’s also very presentation tier related, which I think Observable is conscious of, and is doing well at being minimal. This fits that minimal but meaningful space I think.
If it’s under consideration, I recommend Inconsolata or Fira. GCP just put Inconsolata into their private source repo editors, looks pretty sharp.
It’s less likely that we’d enable contextual alternates (the feature Fira Code/Inconsolata use) for the main text editor: we’re using system fonts wherever possible, so that means Menlo on mac, and maybe SF Mono if Apple releases it system-wide. Reason being a combination of wide UTF support, faster load performance, and consistency with the system defaults. And, there are arguments for/against symbol-building fonts which personally I’m sort of anti: for new programmers, fusing != into a not-equals sign makes it less obvious what they should type, which is usually a pretty nice feature of Latin scripts; most things you type are written on the keyboard.
Anyway - for displaying code, though, you can happily load webfonts into a notebook just like you’d do otherwise and override or replace fonts in output, highlighted code, and so on.
love that answer!
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