I came across a long blog about how to make ipython notebooks more aesthetically pleasing recently, and I think there is a lot to be learned there.
The good news is that you can try this out on a notebook-by-notebook basis with a little trick. Just drop this into a cell in any IPython notebook:
import IPython.core.display IPython.core.display.HTML(""" div.input { width: 105ex; /* about 80 chars + buffer */ } div.text_cell { width: 105ex /* instead of 100%, */ } div.text_cell_render { /*font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif;*/ font-family: "Charis SIL", serif; /* Make non-code text serif. */ line-height: 145%; /* added for some line spacing of text. */ width: 105ex; /* instead of 'inherit' for shorter lines */ } /* Set the size of the headers */ div.text_cell_render h1 { font-size: 18pt; } div.text_cell_render h2 { font-size: 14pt; } .CodeMirror { font-family: Consolas, monospace; } """)