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feat(theme): update typography from Lato to Inter for better readability and tabular numbers#98

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nicolastakashi wants to merge 1 commit intomainfrom
chore/font-switch-proposal
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feat(theme): update typography from Lato to Inter for better readability and tabular numbers#98
nicolastakashi wants to merge 1 commit intomainfrom
chore/font-switch-proposal

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Description

This PR modernizes the core typography for all Perses components by migrating the default font from Lato to Inter, falling back to a robust system font stack.

As a data-dense dashboarding application, Perses requires typography that handles metrics perfectly and maintains maximum legibility at small sizes. While Lato is a solid general-purpose font, it falls short of modern UI standards for complex data visualization.

Inter was explicitly engineered for computer screens and UI applications, offering several critical improvements for our use case:

  1. Tabular Figures (Perfect Number Alignment): Inter features explicitly designed tabular numerals, ensuring that numbers of varying widths (like 1 vs 8) take up the exact same horizontal space. This is critical for preventing horizontal jitter in DataGrid columns, charts, and metrics panels where values update in real-time.
  2. Readability at Small Sizes: Inter has a significantly taller "x-height" than Lato, making tiny text (e.g., 11px captions, axis labels, legends) easier to read at a glance without causing eye strain.
  3. Optimized Data Density: Lato is a slightly wider, "humanist" font. Inter is slightly narrower and geometric, allowing us to fit more data columns, metrics, and tags on the screen before truncation occurs.
  4. The Modern UI Standard: Inter is the established gold standard for modern developer tools and SaaS platforms (used by Figma, GitHub, Vercel, Tailwind CSS, etc.). Adopting it instantly makes the Perses UI feel more familiar, polished, and professional to users.

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Checklist

  • Pull request has a descriptive title and context useful to a reviewer.
  • Pull request title follows the [<catalog_entry>] <commit message> naming convention using one of the
    following catalog_entry values: FEATURE, ENHANCEMENT, BUGFIX, BREAKINGCHANGE, DOC,IGNORE.
  • All commits have DCO signoffs.

UI Changes

  • Changes that impact the UI include screenshots and/or screencasts of the relevant changes.
  • Code follows the UI guidelines.
  • E2E tests are stable and unlikely to be flaky.
    See e2e docs for more details. Common issues include:
    • Is the data inconsistent? You need to mock API requests.
    • Does the time change? You need to use consistent time values or mock time utilities.
    • Does it have loading states? You need to wait for loading to complete.

@nicolastakashi nicolastakashi requested a review from a team as a code owner April 2, 2026 21:37
@nicolastakashi nicolastakashi requested review from jgbernalp and removed request for a team April 2, 2026 21:37
@nicolastakashi nicolastakashi force-pushed the chore/font-switch-proposal branch from 8f1cd04 to e5ef5c6 Compare April 2, 2026 22:00
@jgbernalp
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@nicolastakashi it seems the emotion library was removed and seems to be required for building. Maybe is a transitive dependency.

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2 participants