As an experiment, I decided to create a monospaced programming typeface (aka font) designed for displaying Julia code. (Of course it should also work well for (legacy) code written in other languages!)
When working with Julia, we customize our working environment to make it personal to us. We choose our favourite operating system, text editor, desktop wallpaper, background music - and of course the font that we use to display our code. In this talk I'll describe some of the challenges I've encountered in my ongoing experiment to see if it's possible to build a coding font particularly suited for Julia programming. I hope to be able to show a few snapshots of my progress.
The field of typeface design has been generating jargon for years - points, picas, and ems, glyphs, code points, entasis, counters, PUAs, contextual alternates, substitution tables, ligatures, UFOs, blueshifts - so I might mention in passing a few of these that I encountered as part of the process of making the font legible and readable with the coverage required by the Julia language.
This experiment might also find out whether it would be useful to have an open-source community-owned resource that contains all the characters and features that Julians - whatever their discipline or problem domain - might expect.